I've been alive for many, many decades. I wish I could say I've matured past Uranus double entendres, but I haven't.

Farnsworth: I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all..

Fry: Oh. What's it called now?

Farnsworth: Urectum.

I will freely admit that I had the same reaction to the headline. Ow! I think I'd remember something like that.

#forever12

Title is a bit click-bait-y :-)

You're not the only one.

The simulation suggests it could have happened that way. That doesn't translate well into that headline. (Given the domain name, a person might hope for better.)

Impact hypotheses are a popular type of explanation. Some may survive actual exposure to evidence, and eventually become theories. This is quite an old idea (as is the idea that the Moon impacted the Earth); maybe one day it'll pan out.

Until then, it'd be great to see fewer hypotheses in 'Science News' headlines ... and more evidence.

If the Moon impacted the Earth, why do both appear to still be here?

How is evidence going to materialize for a gas planet like Uranus?

The author Zecharia Sitchin wrote about this in one or more of his books. His claim is that the Sumerians wrote about this exact thing.

So Uranus is "tilted on its side relative to its fellow planets, by about 98 degrees." Why is that not an 82-degree rotation?

Axial tilt is sometimes defined such that 0° is when the orbital and rotational axes align, including direction of rotation; Venus has a tilt of 177° by this standard, because of its retrograde rotation compared to the majority of the planets.

Possibly because that would explain its rotation being the reverse of the other planets(except Venus). If it started rotating the same way as the other planets and were rotated 82 degrees, it would still be rotating in the same direction as the other planets, where as by rotating 98 degrees, the rotation is reversed.

In theory, would it be possible to look for the object by looking in the direction predicted by the model?

if something is rotating clockwise with respect to surroundings. let us say, and we were to then turn the object 180 degrees in a plane perpendicular to its rotation, the result is an object that is now rotating COUNTERCLOCKWISE with respect to its surroundings.

In summary, an impact with a another rotating object and transfer of momentum is not the only way. the object could have undergone a pole flip.