A collisionless scenario for Uranus tilting
Gwenaël Boué, Jacques Laskar
(Submitted on 1 Dec 2009)

As seen in:

DiscoveryNews

A lot of ifs in that article, and one shouldn't read the comment thread without making sure one's blood pressure prescription is current.

Interesting; thanks, Lyford!

(You ain't lying about that comment thread...sheesh! )

The nutbar factor is high.

Interesting how the proposed moon is ~15% Earth mass. That's roughly the size of the small planet proposed to cause the truncation of the Kuiper Belt in a separate scenario. I wonder if two birds couldn't be killed with one stone?

Oh it wasn't so bad! I only counted two seriously ignorant commenters, only one of whom was nasty. And the responses to them seemed to be thoughful and constructive.

That said, I never would have even looked at the comments if I hadn't been warned not to. :-)

As for the article, I wonder if they explored the possibility that the moon was retrograde and eventually fell into the planet. That would leave the question of how it is that Uranus has any moons at all now, of course.

--Greg

What, no comments on this?

each Uranian hemisphere experiences 42 years of continuous sunlight (a year on Uranus is 84 Earth years).

That just doesn't sound right.