The large obliquity of Saturn explained by the fast migration of Titan

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new explanation for Saturn's large obliquity, suggesting recent resonance encounters driven by Titan's migration, challenging previous theories of early tilting during planetary migration.

Contribution

It introduces a novel scenario where Titan's fast migration caused a recent resonance, explaining Saturn's obliquity and revising understanding of giant planet spin-axis evolution.

Findings

Resonance with Saturn's obliquity occurred about 1 Gyr ago.

Titan's migration is incompatible with early tilting scenarios.

Saturn's normalized polar moment of inertia is between 0.224 and 0.237.

Abstract

The obliquity of a planet is the tilt between its equator and its orbital plane. Giant planets are expected to form with near-zero obliquities. After its formation, some dynamical mechanism must therefore have tilted Saturn up to its current obliquity of 26.7{\deg}. This event is traditionally thought to have happened more than 4 Gyrs ago during the late planetary migration because of the crossing of a resonance between the spin-axis precession of Saturn and the nodal orbital precession mode of Neptune. Here, we show that the fast tidal migration of Titan measured by Lainey et al. (2020) is incompatible with this scenario, and that it offers a new explanation for Saturn's current obliquity. A significant migration of Titan would prevent any early resonance, invalidating previous constraints on the late planetary migration set by the tilting of Saturn. We propose instead that the resonance was encountered recently, about 1 Gyr ago, forcing Saturn's obliquity to increase from a small value (possibly less than 3{\deg}), up to its current state. This scenario suggests that Saturn's normalised polar moment of inertia lies between 0.224 and 0.237. Our findings bring out a new paradigm for the spin-axis evolution of Saturn, Jupiter, and possibly giant exoplanets in multiple systems, whereby obliquities are not settled once for all, but continuously evolve as a result of the migration of their satellites.