Strange planet discovered: It has a perpendicular orbit around two wannabe suns
In what could be one of the strangest sightings, astronomers have discovered a planet in deep space with an unexpected orbit. What's more? It's orbiting two celestial objects that are neither suns, nor planets.The planet, informally dubbed 2M1510, traces out an orbit that carries it far over the poles of two brown dwarfs.Nasa said that this pair of mysterious objects – too massive to be planets, not massive enough to be stars – also orbit each other. Yet a third brown dwarf orbits the other two at an extreme distance.advertisement
What sets 2M1510 b apart is its dramatic 'polar orbit.'Unlike the familiar arrangement of our solar system, where planets orbit in a flat, coplanar plane aligned with their star's equator, this planet's orbital path is nearly perpendicular to the plane in which the two brown dwarfs revolve around each other.Scientists liken the configuration to two disks crossing in an X-shape—a cosmic geometry never before confirmed for a planet in a circumbinary system.Such circumbinary planets—those orbiting two stars or brown dwarfs at once—are themselves rare, with only 16 confirmed among more than 5,800 known exoplanets. But a circumbinary planet in a 90-degree polar orbit is unprecedented.The discovery was made using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, which detected subtle shifts in the brown dwarfs' 21-day mutual orbit. advertisementThese anomalies, measured via the radial velocity method, could only be explained by the gravitational tug of a third, unseen object: the candidate planet in its extreme orbit.The research, led by Thomas A. Baycroft at the University of Birmingham, was published in Science Advances in April 2025. The planet was entered into NASA's Exoplanet Archive on May 1, 2025, under the full designation 2MASS J15104786-281874, or 2M1510 for short.This discovery not only challenges existing models of planetary system formation but also opens new avenues for studying the dynamics of planets in multi-body systems.As astronomers continue to monitor 2M1510, the system promises to deepen our understanding of the diversity and complexity of worlds beyond our own.Trending Reel
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