A massive object devastated Uranus a long time ago and it never fully recovered | Hacker News Reader

A massive object devastated Uranus a long time ago and it never fully recovered

bgr.com

5 pointsgukov8 comments

I can still chuckle at this headline in 2018, right?

Based on its immense size and gravity, Uranus can still take a pounding.

The science priests at work again with their guesswork and "most likely" theories.

I'm super confused reading comments like this. We can observe that Uranus is tilted and we want to figure out why it is so - so of course we will have to keep testing theories until we find one that explains the current setup. How else do you imagine it working? I see your use of "priests" as derogatory in this context, can you explain more about what you have in mind? Or are you just trolling?

> I'm super confused reading comments like this.

Ditto. Generally you see that the people taking a loosely-veiled stab at science articles are also genuinely religious themselves. It appears that it's fine to hold faith, but not fine to actively study the truth behind the matter.

The flip side is the trolls, and I genuinely don't understand why some people perceive it to be cool or funny to just arbitrarily go against the grain of a conversation.

If it was hit by a huge object with enough force to tilt an entire planet, parts of it would be ripped away. It would no longer be round.

I'm not a troll or religious. I just question the blind belief in whatever comes from our space agencies. A lot of things make zero sense but people are just trusting them anyway.

Non-round stuff in space of a sufficient mass does tend to shift back to being round over the course of millions of years, so absence of non-roundness is not proof that parts of it were not ripped away at some point or other. Uranus is a gas giant (actually some call it an ice giant) so there's no way it would ever take a non-round shape for more than a few instants).

What you call "space agencies" is in this case Durham University's department of Computational Cosmology; if you read the article, there is no need to blindly believe anything: Uranus had been observed having strange behaviour compared to other planets in the solar system, and the researchers at Durham just built a computational model that shows how you can "derive" the observable behaviour of Uranus by starting with a "healthy" planet and simulating an impact with a massive object. That's it.

Is it the Holy Gospel? No. But it's a simple explanation which does not violate any law of physics and which does not necessitate further hypotheses being made. Is it the truth? Who knows, maybe in the future we will disprove this theory in a conclusive way and a new hypothesis will take its place: that's how science works, no belief needed.

It's their hypothesis, backed up with hard work & simulations.

Alternate hypotheses welcome. That's the joy of science!

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