Two of Saturn’s satellites — its largest and one of its weirdest — may owe their current forms and orbits to a two-moon pileup about 400 million years ago.
A smashup between a doomed moon and the massive moon Titan could have birthed the spongy-looking Hyperion, a study submitted February 9 to arXiv.org suggests. Ensuing chaos in the Saturn system could then have led to the formation of its rings.
The notion builds on a 2022 proposal by another team, which suggested the existence of a former moon to solve some long-standing mysteries about the Saturn system, including its relatively high tilt, its youthful rings and the orbital relationships