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Mars once had rings like Saturn and a much bigger moon, study finds
Mars once had rings like Saturn and a much bigger moon, a new study has revealed.
While Mars currently has two small moons, Phobos and Deimos, scientists from the SETI Institute and Purdue University believe that the red planet once had a much bigger moon.
Deimos, the smaller of the two moon, has an orbit that’s titled by two degrees, leading the researchers to question Mars’ past.
Matija Cuk, a researcher on the study, said: “The fact that Deimos’s orbit is not exactly in plane with Mars’s equator was considered unimportant, and nobody cared to try to explain it. But once we had a big new idea and we looked at it with new eyes, Deimos’s orbital tilt revealed its big secret.”
The researchers suggest that Mars used to have several moons, but these were destroyed over billions of years by the planet’s rings.
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