Fraser Cain on Nostr: Mars has two small moons: Phobos and Deimos. But did it have a larger third moon in ...

Mars has two small moons: Phobos and Deimos. But did it have a larger third moon in the past? In a new paper, a researcher proposes that a massive moon could help explain an outstanding puzzle about the shape of Mars. The planet has a "triaxial" shape, which means it doesn't just share the oblate spheroid shape of Earth and other rotating planets; it bulges out in a third axis. A massive moon could have distorted Mars into this shape, and then the moon was lost.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.14725