PEOPLE - Venus may be moonless today, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it always was.
A new study suggests that if Venus once had a moon, the planet’s unusually slow rotation could have eventually pulled the celestial body back toward its surface, potentially ending with a massive collision. After the collision, the fragments of the moon may have been “devoured,” Wired reported.
The research, titled Tidal Demise: The Evolution and Fate of a Hypothetical Venus Moon, explores what might happen if a moon orbited Venus under a range of different conditions. University of California, Riverside astrophysicist and Planetary Astrophysics professor Stephen Kane was one of the paper’s lead authors.