While all moons are known to float away from their host planets, Saturn's moon, Titan, is drifting away from its host planet a 100 times faster than what was previously understood, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has discovered.
NASA used data from its Cassini spacecraft to discover that Titan is drifting about four inches, or 11 centimeters, per year.
The discovery, according to NASA, is important because it would help in addressing the question of when Saturn's rings and its system of more than 80 moons was formed.
While scientists know that Saturn was formed about 4.6 billion years ago, the rate at which Titan is drifting, according to NASA, suggests that the entire solar system might have expanded at a greater speed than what was previously understood.
"This result brings an important new piece of the puzzle for the highly debated question of the age of the Saturn system and how its moons formed," Valery Lainey, lead author of the research, said.
"The new measurements imply that these kind of planet-moon interactions can be more prominent than prior expectations and that they can apply to many systems, such as other planetary moon systems, exoplanets — those outside our solar system — and even binary star systems, where stars orbit each other," Jim Fuller, co-author of the paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, said.
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