About four billion years ago, an asteroid so large hit Ganymede one of Jupiter’s moons, which changed its axis of rotation according to a study carried out by a researcher at Kobe University in Japan.
Ganymede is the largest moon of Jupiter and also in the Solar System (bigger than the planet Mercury, in fact) and, like Earth’s Moon, it always shows the same side to the planet and has a “hidden” side. Since Jupiter’s moon is covered in craters that form concentric circles, researchers had already concluded since the 1980s that it had been the victim of a large impact.
“We know that this feature was created by an asteroid impact about 4 billion years ago, but we weren’t sure how big this impact was and what effect it had on the moon,” said Hirata Naoyuki, a researcher at Kobe University.
It was Hirata who first noticed that the location of Ganymede’s crater was similar to that of a crater on Pluto resulting from an impact that shifted the dwarf planet’s axis. This insight suggested that the moon might have experienced the same thing.
Hirata’s study was published in the Scientific Reports journal this Tuesday (3).
According to their research, the asteroid that hit Ganymede four billion years ago was about 300 km in diameter, 20 times larger than the asteroid responsible for ending the age of dinosaurs on Earth 65 million years ago.
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This content was originally published in Giant asteroid impact changed the axis of Jupiter’s moon, says study on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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