On mooning about celestial shenanigans

Given that he is the biggest kid on our celestial block, news that Jupiter was a bit of a bully in his youth does not come as a surprise. Knocking a fellow astral ‘playmate’ out of the solar system about four billion years ago would be par for the course for that kind of bumptious lad anyway, especially if adolescent star systems are indeed prone to such encounters as recent studies suggest. Deep space in reality appears to be quite the opposite of silent, with titanic heavenly bodies crashing against each other and then careening out of orbit like dodgem cars in an empyrean funfair. Moreover, the whereabouts of the ejected orb would certainly add a piquant new angle to perceptions about our supposedly peaceful ‘family’ of planets and moons.

Another suspected planetary bully, Saturn, has apparently been saved by one of its moons, Iapetus, from the opprobrium of that odious primordial deed in the same way as Jupiter was indicted by the trajectory of its moon Callisto. This clearly elevates such satellites to the status of important character witnesses rather than mere powerless particles in the cosmic centrifuge. Our own benevolent moon — already the preordained witness to many a human rite of passage — can doubtless tell an interesting tale or two about Mother Earth’s deeds in her skittish girlhood too.