
A massive object devastated Uranus a long time ago and it never fully recovered - gukov
https://bgr.com/2018/07/03/uranus-collision-early-solar-system/
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tenfold
I can still chuckle at this headline in 2018, right?

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walrus01
Based on its immense size and gravity, Uranus can still take a pounding.

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

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gambiting
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?

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some_account
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.

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GiuseppaAcciaio
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.

