Produced by: Mohsin Shaikh
Credit: ESO/L. Calçada
Astronomers finally found strong evidence of a planet orbiting at a 90° angle around two stars — a configuration only theorized until now.
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Like Star Wars' twin-sun world, planets orbiting two stars aren't rare anymore — but one at a right angle? That’s a whole new chapter.
Credit: ESO/L. Calçada
This exoplanet, named 2M1510 (AB) b, spins around its binary hosts in a perfect polar orbit, defying the usual flat-plane rules of cosmic motion.
The planet orbits two rare brown dwarfs — objects too massive to be planets yet too tiny to be real stars, creating a bizarre gravitational waltz.
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The brown dwarfs eclipse each other from Earth's view, helping scientists detect the planet's extreme tilt through tiny wobbles and subtle gravitational pulls.
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The discovery was completely accidental — astronomers were studying the stars’ movement and stumbled upon the first clear sign of a polar-orbiting planet.
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As lead astronomers said, the planet wasn’t what they were looking for — making this groundbreaking find even more thrilling for the scientific community.
This discovery hints that cosmic formations might be far stranger than human models predict, broadening how we imagine planet and star systems form.
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2M1510 (AB) b isn’t just rare — it’s rewriting exoplanet science by showing that polar orbits around binaries can and do happen naturally.