Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Neptune May Have Eaten a Planet and Stolen Its Moon

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the wakka-wakka-wakka dept.

jitendraharlalka noted a piece about the origins of Neptune. There is a theory now that it once ate a super-earth in the outer solar system, and kept its moon as some sort of macabre trophy to make sure that Mars and Venus didn't get any big ideas.

5 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Silly Goose by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Kronos is the one that eats babies, not Neptune!

    1. Re:Silly Goose by DrData99 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Did you even read the article you linked to? "It depicts the Greek myth of the Titan Cronus (in the title Romanised to Saturn), who, fearing that his children would overthrow him, ate each one upon their birth."

  2. Re:Nuclear? by oldspewey · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you're willing to classify radioisotope decay as a form of "fission," then not only is it likely, it's highly probable.

    http://www.physlink.com/News/121103PotassiumCore.cfm
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decay

    --
    If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
  3. Re:Some orbital dynamics by simonbp · · Score: 5, Informative

    The reason we invoked the extra planet was that in these three-body encounters, it's much more likely that the more massive object gets ejected and the smaller captured. However, the surveys of the Kuiper Belt are such that if Triton had larger twin, we'd have found it by now. But noone has, so a different capture method remains plausible. The existence of the extra planet isn't actually the hard part to prove, but rather that it impacted instead of being tossed by Neptune down to Saturn or Jupiter, who could then throw it out of the solar system.

    Still lots of work to be done...

    -Simon Porter, Coauthor

  4. Re:Some orbital dynamics by simonbp · · Score: 5, Informative

    what happens in these binary captures is that you have two objects orbiting around each other and falling at essentially escape velocity towards Neptune. If it were just one object, it would either hit Neptune or zoom past and leave Neptune's sphere of influence. But since there are two objects, one is going slightly faster than escape velocity, and the other slightly slower. If there is no collision, then one that is going slower can be captured, while the other is ejected from the system. If the two objects are not of equal mass, then the smaller is going to be moving faster than the larger, and thus there is much wider window of opportunity for it to be captured. So, it's not impossible for the larger to be captured, just much less likely.

    In the case of a collision, it is more like likely that the larger will impact, as the center of mass is closer to it, and impacts are the merging of centers of mass. In this case, we think that Triton would be in a sufficiently wide orbit that it would watch the impact from a distance, and then either ejected (if its orbital velocity was in the impact direction) or captured (if its orbital velocity was in the opposite direction). So, Amphtrite could have had multiple moons, but Triton was the one on the correct quarter of the orbital phase to be captured.

    Simon Porter