Although not as cool a planet as a Jupiter or Saturn, and quite often the butt of cosmic jokes, Uranus has recently come to our attention as new experimental research has a possible finding on why this planet has such an oddball spin and orbit.
Durham University in the UK , partnering with NASA utilizing help of a supercomputer, has developed a working computer model that stipulates that a small planetoid impacted the planet possibly 4 billion years ago and caused the erratic nature of Uranus’s planetary movements.
With some data being determined with the help of the Kepler telescope and information that has been able to be recorded ,concerning the planets unique attributes, has given scientists the best information on understanding the farther edges of our solar system.
“Uranus spins on its side, with its axis pointing almost at right angles to those of all the other planets in the solar system. This was almost certainly caused by a giant impact, but we know very little about how this actually happened and how else such a violent event affected the planet. We ran more than 50 different impact scenarios using a high-powered supercomputer to see if we could recreate the conditions that shaped the planet’s evolution.”
“Our findings confirm that the most likely outcome was that the young Uranus was involved in a cataclysmic collision with an object twice the mass of Earth, if not larger, knocking it on to its side and setting in process the events that helped create the planet we see today,” said Jacob Kegerreis, PhD researcher in Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology,in a statement on the University Of Durham website.