Strange planet discovered: It has a perpendicular orbit around two wannabe suns
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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The results, published in the journal Science Advances, showed where the magnetic field was compromised, allowing radiation and particles to slip through. Researchers know the magnetic field went haywire way back then by examining minerals smaller than the width of a human hair found within ancient deep-sea sediments and volcanic rocks. These tiny grains, which contain iron, become magnetized, and their alignment offers clues about the state of Earth's magnetic field at the time. The researchers' analysis suggests Earth's northern and southern latitudes up to 40 degrees would have been disproportionately affected by the weakening. This area in the Northern Hemisphere—including what is today Spain—is where many Neanderthal and Homo sapiens populations lived. 'As an anthropologist, I was intrigued, because I think a lot about how climate and weather might have affected Homo sapiens and other species, but I never thought about space," said Raven Garvey, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and Mukhopadhyay's co-author. For about a millennium or two, during the Laschamps event, Earth would have experienced higher levels of invisible, cosmic radiation. But the impact of a thinner ozone layer wasn't just about increased radiation exposure. It also would have affected cloud cover, wind belts, rainfall and general weather patterns. 'It's not that the UV kills everybody," said Alan Cooper, an evolutionary biologist at Charles Sturt University in Australia who wasn't involved in the recent work but has published research with similar conclusions. 'It's climate change. Everything goes completely wild at that point." Not only did Neanderthals disappear from the fossil record around this time, Cooper added, but so did other species across the disproportionately affected areas. Mukhopadhyay's group suggested two theories of what helped Homo sapiens, who interbred with Neanderthals, to survive: the use of a primitive kind of sunscreen known as ocher—a naturally occurring pigment composed of iron oxide often used for cave art—to protect their bodies from the sun, and clothing that hugged the body and covered more skin. Right around the time of the Laschamps event, there was an uptick in cave art at sites archaeologists have linked to Homo sapiens, according to Cooper. Anthropologists hypothesize that Homo sapiens also used ocher on their skin based on the fact that populations living in Africa and Australia today apply the pigment as a skin protectant, said Andrew Zipkin, an archaeological scientist affiliated with Arizona State University who wasn't involved in the recent study. Archaeological sites linked to Neanderthals and modern humans have both yielded stone tools called scrapers used for processing animal hides to make them supple and wearable, Garvey said. But researchers have found evidence of a broader clothing-making tool kit at Homo sapiens-related sites. 'We're also seeing things like needles and awls and the kinds of implements that would be very useful to poke holes in these hides and then stitch them together with sinew in the mass production of tailored clothing," she added. Anthropologists are careful to note that the coincident timing of the Neanderthal extinction and the Laschamps event could have been mere chance. Differences in population sizes and other things could also have made the species's survival less likely, according to Tony Capra, a University of California, San Francisco evolutionary geneticist who wasn't involved in the work. The goal of the recent work, according to the study authors, was to focus on one aspect of a multifaceted mystery. 'Whoever had the tailored clothing probably did have this advantage," Garvey said. 'But was it exclusive to one group and was it enough to lead to the extinction of one and the proliferation of the other? These are million-dollar questions." Write to Aylin Woodward at
