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Astronomers have discovered a planet with an extraordinary orbit—circling its two host stars at a 90-degree angle in a real-life twist on the twin suns of Luke Skywalker’s fictional home planet, Tatooine. Named 2M1510 (AB) b, this exoplanet is the first known to orbit perpendicularly around a pair of eclipsing brown dwarfs, an extremely rare and exotic system.
Brown dwarfs are celestial objects more massive than gas-giant planets but too small to sustain nuclear fusion like true stars. The host pair in this case, known as 2M1510, represents only the second known eclipsing brown dwarf binary—meaning the two objects periodically pass in front of each other from our point of view, creating eclipses detectable from Earth.
The discovery, published in Science Advances, was led by an international team of researchers from the University of Birmingham using data from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. The exoplanet’s orbit is dramatically different from anything previously observed in such systems.
Thomas Baycroft, a Ph.D. student at the University of Birmingham who led the research, said, “We had theoretical predictions that planets could orbit perpendicular to their host binaries, but this is the first solid observational evidence of such a configuration. After exploring every other possibility, only a polar orbit makes sense with the data.”
The team identified the exoplanet while studying the orbital dynamics of the two brown dwarfs with the VLT's Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES). Unusual variations in the stars' motions hinted at an unseen companion—one influencing their orbits in a unique and complex way.
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https://github.com/AdamSNY/Racing-Master-Open-World-unlimited-money-MOD These findings trace back to 2018 when the binary brown dwarf system 2M1510 was first discovered as part of the SPECULOOS survey, a project co-led by Professor Amaury Triaud at the University of Birmingham. This survey focuses on ultra-cool stars and brown dwarfs in the search for potentially habitable exoplanets.
Professor Triaud remarked, “To find a planet not only orbiting a binary but a binary of brown dwarfs, and on a polar trajectory, is extraordinary. We weren’t even looking for this—it was a completely unexpected discovery. It shows how surprising and diverse planetary systems in the universe can be.”
A major breakthrough came thanks to new data analysis techniques developed at Birmingham by Dr. Lalitha Sairam, now at the University of Cambridge. Her methods improved the precision of the observations by a factor of 30, allowing the team to detect subtle changes in the stars’ velocities and reveal the planet’s influence.
“Brown dwarfs are faint and challenging to study,” said Dr. Sairam. “But with this boost in precision, we noticed that their orbital behavior was being subtly but clearly altered—evidence that something else, like a planet, was affecting them.”
This discovery opens a new chapter in exoplanet research, showing that planetary systems can form and evolve in even the most unlikely environments. A planet orbiting at a right angle to its stars is a striking reminder of the universe’s complexity—and its capacity to surprise.
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