At the rate of 11 cm per year, Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, moves away from its planet. It is a hundred times faster than what has been commonly accepted by astronomers for several decades. "This is a very exciting result, which completely calls into question what we thought we knew about the way in which the moons and rings around Saturn were formed , " comments Alessandro Morbidelli, specialist in celestial mechanics at the Observatory. from the Côte d'Azur to Nice.
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“I had arrived at this order of magnitude for the removal of Titan for several years, but I had kept this result aside because it was too surprising, too bizarre, and until very recently I had no way of knowing. 'explain' , frankly recognizes Valéry Lainey, astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory and first author of the discovery published on June 8 in the journal Nature Astronomy .
"The fact that a natural satellite is moving away from its planet is a phenomenon linked to the tides, which began to be
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