Nearby planetary system is seriously screwed up

Bad Astronomy
By Phil Plait
May 24, 2010 9:41 PMNov 20, 2019 5:32 AM

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Our solar system is pretty neat and orderly. Yeah, it has some issues, but in general we can make some broad statements about it: the planets all orbit the Sun in the same direction, for one thing, and they also orbit pretty much in the same plane. If you look at the system from the side, the orbits would all look flat, like a DVD seen from the side. That's left over from the formation of the solar system itself, which happened when a cloud of dust and gas collapsed into a disk. The planets formed from that disk, so they all orbit in roughly the same plane. We see other systems forming in the same way, so we assume that when we look at those planets, they'll also have all their planets in a plane. Oops. Maybe not so much. Astronomers have just announced that they've confirmed a system where the planets are not all aligned this way, and in fact the planets are titled relative to each other by as much as 30°!

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