But Titan\u2019s drifting orbit is just one of many puzzles<\/a> that astronomers are trying to solve about Saturn and some of its 274 moons<\/a>. Many of the questions have arisen from data collected by Cassini<\/a>, a spacecraft that explored the Saturnian system from 2004 to 2017.<\/p>\n New research has combined<\/a> previous theories of Titan\u2019s formation, data from Cassini and computer simulations to suggest a novel origin story for Saturn\u2019s largest moon. The study was published this month on the open-access repository ArXiv and accepted for publication in The Planetary Science Journal.<\/p>\n \u201cIn this paper, I tried to put all these things together, and I propose that there was an extra moon about half a billion years ago that collided with Titan, that actually became part of Titan,\u201d said lead author Matija \u0106uk, a research scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. SETI is a nonprofit organization that explores topics such as planetary science, the origin of life and extraterrestrial intelligence.<\/p>\n The collision could also have produced Hyperion<\/a>, the largest of Saturn\u2019s nonspherical moons, which is far smaller than Titan at about 5% of its diameter. According to this theory, Hyperion could either be a fragment that resulted from the collision between Titan and the lost moon, or it may have formed later from debris that accumulated around Titan\u2019s orbit.<\/p>\n A false-color view of Saturn’s moon Hyperion, obtained during Cassini’s flyby in September 2005. – NASA\/JPL\/Space Science Institute<\/p>\n The merger between Titan and the lost moon could also have led to the formation of Saturn\u2019s rings, \u0106uk added. \u201cFrom this event, Titan could have perturbed some of the inner moons into more collisions, which created the rings sometime later, maybe 100 million years ago,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n An extra moon \u2018explains everything\u2019<\/p>\n The researchers found telltale signs<\/a> of an ancient collision in Saturn\u2019s tilt, which is made obvious by its rings; the gas giant rotates at an angle of 26.7 degrees<\/a> compared with the plane at which it orbits the sun.<\/p>\n Saturn’s rings are tilted about 26.7 degrees relative to the planet’s orbital plane. – NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/Space Science Institute<\/p>\n Before Cassini\u2019s mission, astronomers believed<\/a> that gravitational disturbances inflicted by neighbor Neptune\u2019s orbit caused Saturn\u2019s tilt over time.<\/p>\n \u201cThe orbit of Neptune has a bit of a wobble in space,\u201d \u0106uk said. \u201cThe orbits of planets are huge and have huge energy. But the spins of planets are much, much smaller, so if you connect these two motions \u2014 the orbit of Neptune and the spin of Saturn \u2014 it is the spin of Saturn that will change.\u201d<\/p>\n However, Cassini\u2019s data showed that the two planets are not exactly in sync, pointing to a missing element. In 2022, astronomers suggested that a lost moon, which they named Chrysalis<\/a>, was a probable explanation for Saturn\u2019s current tilt. It once orbited the planet, for billions of years, contributing to Saturn\u2019s resonance with Neptune, but around 160 million years ago the moon came too close to Saturn and was pulled apart in an event that created the planet\u2019s rings and shifted its tilt.<\/p>\n \u0106uk and his colleagues refined that idea. They hypothesize that the event was not just a moon grazing Saturn and then disintegrating but a collision between predecessors of both Titan and Hyperion. \u201cI call it proto-Hyperion, but it was 1,000 times larger \u2014 it was like a smaller version of Titan,\u201d \u0106uk said.<\/p>\n This lost moon collided with Titan and lost much of its mass, an event that would explain Titan\u2019s drifting orbit and Saturn\u2019s spin. \u201cRight now, Saturn is wobbling a little bit too fast,\u201d \u0106uk said. \u201cBut if you go back a few hundreds of millions of years when we saw this happen, the wobble was just short of what we needed to have the resonance with Neptune. And if you add an extra moon, you make it exact. And that explains everything.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, the gravity and mass of the lost moon kept Saturn and Neptune in sync, and only its disappearance explains why they are now slightly misaligned.<\/p>\n If the collision also created Hyperion in its current form \u2014 a smaller, tumbling, misshapen rock \u2014 it would explain why its orbit is locked with Titan\u2019s. But it remains unclear, \u0106uk said, whether Hyperion is a fragment of Titan\u2019s precursor or of the lost moon that merged with it.<\/p>\n According to the study,<\/strong> Saturn\u2019s rings could have formed hundreds of millions of years after the event. Titan\u2019s expanding orbit interacted with some of Saturn\u2019s inner moons, disturbing them to the point of making them smash into each other. Some of the resulting debris survived as the rings.<\/p>\n A paper<\/a> published in February, which postulates that Titan\u2019s surface is as young as 300 million years old based on the lack of impact craters, lends credibility to the collision scenario, according to \u0106uk.<\/p>\n But the best way to test the theory is using NASA\u2019s Dragonfly<\/a> \u2014 a nuclear-powered, car-size rotorcraft that will fly over Titan\u2019s surface and land in different spots to collect and analyze samples with its onboard instruments. It is currently scheduled to launch in 2028 for arrival on Titan by late 2034.<\/p>\n Dragonfly, seen here in an artist’s concept, is set to be able to land on Titan’s surface. – NASA\/Johns Hopkins APL<\/p>\n \u2018It\u2019s complicated\u2019<\/p>\n The evolution of the moons in the Saturn system and the origin of the rings are interesting puzzles that have intrigued scientists, said Linda Spilker, a senior research and planetary scientist at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was not involved with the study.<\/p>\n \u201cThe rings may be as young as just a few hundred million years, or were formed at the same time as Saturn,\u201d Spilker added in an email. \u201cThis study provides compelling evidence for Hyperion and Saturn\u2019s rings forming well after Saturn formed.\u201d<\/p>\n Like an intricate musical clock, Saturn and its satellites spin and orbit with a variety of beats and resonances, according to William B. Hubbard, professor emeritus of planetary sciences at the University of Arizona who was also not part of the research.<\/p>\n Saturn wobbles like a spinning top at a frequency that is suspiciously close to a basic frequency of the solar system, but it is not quite in tune, suggesting that some sort of relatively recent disruption may have occurred, Hubbard explained in an email.<\/p>\n A view of Titan from Cassini, with the sun illuminating the moon’s north polar seas. – NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/University of Arizona\/University of Idaho<\/p>\n \u201cA 2022 study proposed that there was an extinct satellite, dubbed Chrysalis, responsible for forming the rings, but the probability of such an event was disappointingly low,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe new study by \u0106uk et al shows that a variant of this process, involving the still existing satellite Hyperion, is more probable.\u201d<\/p>\n The scenario proposed by \u0106uk and his colleagues provides a complicated but highly plausible sequence of events that explains the Saturnian system as scientists see it today, according to Carl Murray, an emeritus professor of mathematics and astronomy at Queen Mary University of London. Murray was not involved in the work but was a member of the Cassini team.<\/p>\n Astronomers long suspected that the Saturn system had evolved since its formation, but detailing the extent of change had always been a problem, he noted in an email.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a bit like \u2018CSI: Saturn\u2019 \u2014 we have clear forensic evidence that something unusual had happened,\u201d he said, \u201cbut until Cassini we were effectively only dealing with a snapshot of the crime scene and left trying to deduce possible culprits.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the many legacies of Cassini\u2019s 13 years of detailed measurements, combined with historical data, has been the discovery that Titan\u2019s orbit is expanding much faster than had been expected, Murray continued.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Saturn system is a dynamicist\u2019s paradise with numerous numerical relationships \u2014 called resonances \u2014 between the orbital periods of pairs of its moons. \u2018It\u2019s complicated\u2019 is a fair description of all these dynamical relationships over the past 400 million years, but the authors identify Titan\u2019s role as key to our understanding of the Saturn system.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/14ebbe301f93ed93661152b77e089163.jpeg\"\/)
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