Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute in New York City. Paul received his PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011, and spent three years at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, followed by a research fellowship in Trieste, Italy, His research focuses on many diverse topics, from the emptiest regions of the universe to the earliest moments of the Big Bang to the hunt for the first stars. As an 'Agent to the Stars,' Paul has passionately engaged the public in science outreach for several years. He is the host of the popular 'Ask a Spaceman!' podcast, author of 'Your Place in the Universe' and 'How to Die in Space' and he frequently appears on TV — including on The Weather Channel, for which he serves as Official Space Specialist.
The early solar system did not look much like the solar system of the present day. The giant planets in particular probably formed much closer together and much closer to the sun. Over time, interactions among them and with wandering planetesimals outward, with Uranus and Neptune migrating the farthest.
Each of the giant planets formed with a collection of moons, but those moons got reshuffled as the planets migrated. With all the complicated gravitational dynamics going on, some planets lost moons while others gained new ones. So Uranus, could have been born with or quickly captured a massive moon. And if the moon was big enough, it could have started playing games with the planet's spin.
Uranus likely started out with a random but small tilt. Over time, that tilt will precess, as astronomers call it, with the direction of the planet's rotation wobbling like a gigantic top. Usually, a moon doesn't care about its planet's precession of tilt. But it's possible for a moon to get locked into a resonance pattern, in which the length of time needed to precess matches up with a whole number of orbits of the moon.
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