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| Mimas, Saturn's mysteriously wobbly moon | Jan 16, 2015 9:42 AM PST | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:A few or three months ago, a group of French, Belgian, and American astronomers reported (BBC) their finding that Saturn's moon Mimas wobbles as it rotates around its axis: the tiny 400 km diameter moon shifts side to side by as much as 6 km as it turns. That's twice as much wobble as the scientists expected to find, and they've been trying to come up with theories to explain it; the leading one is that Mimas has an interior "global ocean" separating the core from the outer shell, allowing the outer part to wobble freely. The other main theory proposes that the wobble could be caused by a rocky lunar core "that was squashed or elongated by 20-60 km."
Mimas does feature the huge "Herschel Crater, one-third the size of Mimas itself," but the ancient impact that must have caused it isn't thought to have been sufficient to account for the current wobble all by itself.
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