Astronomers have discovered a planet orbiting at an angle of 90 degrees around a rare pair of peculiar stars, marking the first strong evidence of a “polar planet” in such an orbit. This surprising discovery was made using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT).
While planets orbiting two stars, similar to the fictional Tatooine in Star Wars, have been observed before, they typically follow orbits that align with the plane in which the host stars orbit each other. The idea of planets with perpendicular orbits around binary stars has been theorized, but until now, there was no clear evidence supporting their existence.
The exoplanet, named 2M1510 (AB) b, orbits a pair of young brown dwarfs — objects larger than gas-giant planets but too small to be proper stars. The two brown dwarfs form an eclipsing binary system, where they eclipse each other as seen from Earth. This system is highly unusual, as it is only the second known pair of eclipsing brown dwarfs, and it hosts the first exoplanet found on an orbit at right angles to its host stars.
“I am particularly excited to be involved in detecting credible evidence that this configuration exists,” said Thomas Baycroft, a PhD student at the University of Birmingham, who led the study published in Science Advances.
The discovery was made while refining the orbital and physical parameters of the two brown dwarfs using the Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES) on ESO’s VLT at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. The pair of brown dwarfs, known as 2M1510, was first detected in 2018 by the SPECULOOS project. The astronomers observed unusual gravitational effects on the brown dwarfs, leading them to infer the existence of the planet in this unique orbital configuration.
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