\n But Titan\u2019s drifting orbit is just one of many puzzles<\/a> that astronomers are trying to solve about Saturn and some of its 274 moons<\/a>. Many of the questions have arisen from data collected by Cassini<\/a>, a spacecraft that explored the Saturnian system from 2004 to 2017.\n <\/p>\n \n New research has combined<\/a> previous theories of Titan\u2019s formation, data from Cassini and computer simulations to suggest a novel origin story for Saturn\u2019s largest moon. The study was published this month on the open-access repository ArXiv and accepted for publication in The Planetary Science Journal.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIn this paper, I tried to put all these things together, and I propose that there was an extra moon about half a billion years ago that collided with Titan, that actually became part of Titan,\u201d said lead author Matija \u0106uk, a research scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. SETI is a nonprofit organization that explores topics such as planetary science, the origin of life and extraterrestrial intelligence.\n <\/p>\n \n The collision could also have produced Hyperion<\/a>, the largest of Saturn\u2019s nonspherical moons, which is far smaller than Titan at about 5% of its diameter. According to this theory, Hyperion could either be a fragment that resulted from the collision between Titan and the lost moon, or it may have formed later from debris that accumulated around Titan\u2019s orbit.\n <\/p>\n \n The merger between Titan and the lost moon could also have led to the formation of Saturn\u2019s rings, \u0106uk added. \u201cFrom this event, Titan could have perturbed some of the inner moons into more collisions, which created the rings sometime later, maybe 100 million years ago,\u201d he said.\n <\/p>\n \n The researchers found telltale signs<\/a> of an ancient collision in Saturn\u2019s tilt, which is made obvious by its rings; the gas giant rotates at an angle of 26.7 degrees<\/a> compared with the plane at which it orbits the sun.\n <\/p>\n \n Before Cassini\u2019s mission, astronomers believed<\/a> that gravitational disturbances inflicted by neighbor Neptune\u2019s orbit caused Saturn\u2019s tilt over time.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThe orbit of Neptune has a bit of a wobble in space,\u201d \u0106uk said. \u201cThe orbits of planets are huge and have huge energy. But the spins of planets are much, much smaller, so if you connect these two motions \u2014 the orbit of Neptune and the spin of Saturn \u2014 it is the spin of Saturn that will change.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n However, Cassini\u2019s data showed that the two planets are not exactly in sync, pointing to a missing element. In 2022, astronomers suggested that a lost moon, which they named Chrysalis<\/a>, was a probable explanation for Saturn\u2019s current tilt. It once orbited the planet, for billions of years, contributing to Saturn\u2019s resonance with Neptune, but around 160 million years ago the moon came too close to Saturn and was pulled apart in an event that created the planet\u2019s rings and shifted its tilt.\n <\/p>\n \n \u0106uk and his colleagues refined that idea. They hypothesize that the event was not just a moon grazing Saturn and then disintegrating but a collision between predecessors of both Titan and Hyperion. \u201cI call it proto-Hyperion, but it was 1,000 times larger \u2014 it was like a smaller version of Titan,\u201d \u0106uk said.\n <\/p>\n \n This lost moon collided with Titan and lost much of its mass, an event that would explain Titan\u2019s drifting orbit and Saturn\u2019s spin. \u201cRight now, Saturn is wobbling a little bit too fast,\u201d \u0106uk said. \u201cBut if you go back a few hundreds of millions of years when we saw this happen, the wobble was just short of what we needed to have the resonance with Neptune. And if you add an extra moon, you make it exact. And that explains everything.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n In other words, the gravity and mass of the lost moon kept Saturn and Neptune in sync, and only its disappearance explains why they are now slightly misaligned.\n <\/p>\n \n If the collision also created Hyperion in its current form \u2014 a smaller, tumbling, misshapen rock \u2014 it would explain why its orbit is locked with Titan\u2019s. But it remains unclear, \u0106uk said, whether Hyperion is a fragment of Titan\u2019s precursor or of the lost moon that merged with it.\n <\/p>\n \n According to the study, Saturn\u2019s rings could have formed hundreds of millions of years after the event. Titan\u2019s expanding orbit interacted with some of Saturn\u2019s inner moons, disturbing them to the point of making them smash into each other. Some of the resulting debris survived as the rings.\n <\/p>\n \n A paper<\/a> published in February, which postulates that Titan\u2019s surface is as young as 300 million years old based on the lack of impact craters, lends credibility to the collision scenario, according to \u0106uk.\n <\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/pia07740-orig.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Saturn's](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/pia12567-orig.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
![\"Dragonfly,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/dragonfly-2024-factsheet-landstill-1-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/pia18432-large.jpg\")
<\/p>\n