The most powerful telescope in Europe has seen something rare while observing two brown dwarfs: a perpendicular planet

Today, in things that we did not know that there were in other star systems: a planet that orbits perpendicular to its two stars. It is as strange as it sounds.

A different planet. We have seen everything in the exotic exoplanet gallery that the observable universe offers us, but a new surprise has forced astronomers to readjust their expectations.

Using the Vary Large Telescope del Southern European Observatory (ESO) In Chile, astronomers have found the first exoplanet known in a polar orbit around a binary system of stars: two young brown dwarfs.

Orbiting at 90 degrees. Baptized as 2m1510 (AB) B, this world has two Tatooine style soles, something extremely common when it comes to more massive stars, but not so much in the case of brown dwarfs.

However, what is common is that orbits its two host stars in a way that until now had only theorized: turning perpendicular to them, in a polar orbit of 90 degrees.

We sensed that they could exist. Astronomers had already detected planetary training discs in polar orbite and theory suggested that They could form stable planetsBut finding them was another story.

2M1510 (AB) B is the first credible test that this configuration exists. And the most curious thing is that the team was not actively looking for this type of planet, they found it while refining the orbital and physical parameters of the two brown dwarfs, seeing that the path of the two stars was being pushed and pull in unusual ways.

It is not a usual system. The planet is not the only rare in this neighborhood, taking into account the host stars. Brown dwarfs are larger than giant giant planets, but too small to maintain nuclear fusion which characterizes the stars “really”.

But the rarity does not end there. These brown dwarfs form an eclipsest binary, which means that from Earth we can see how they hide each other. 2M1510 (AB) is an incredibly infrequent system: the second pair of eclipsessing brown dwarfs known to date.

With more than 5,800 exoplanets confirmed to date, only about 16 orbit around two stars. That one of them does precisely around a system as atypical as a binary of eclipsessing brown dwarfs, and with a polar orbit, it is a real cosmic jewel.

Image | THAT

In Xataka | These real images were unthinkable before the Webb Telescope: they are planets orbiting other stars to 130 light years