Perpendicular Planet: A 90° Orbit Over Twin Suns Leaves Scientists Stunned

Astronomers have discovered one of the weirdest planetary systems yet: a possible planet, 2M1510 b, appears to orbit over the poles of two brown dwarfs in a sharply tilted path—almost perpendicular to their own orbit.

This freakish setup, unlike anything in our solar system, was detected not by a dip in starlight but through subtle gravitational wobbles captured using ESO’s Very Large Telescope.

A Bizarre New System in Space

Astronomers have uncovered one of the strangest planetary systems ever seen. Nicknamed 2M1510, this system appears to include a planet that loops far over the poles of two brown dwarfs—mysterious celestial bodies that are too heavy to be planets but not quite massive enough to ignite like stars. These two brown dwarfs orbit each other closely, while a third one drifts even farther out, orbiting the pair from a great distance.

In most star systems, including our own solar system, planets typically orbit in the same flat plane as their parent star’s equator. The star’s spin also lines up with this orderly layout, creating a calm, pancake-like structure in space where everything moves together. Everyone is “coplanar:” flat, placid, stately.

A Planet With a Polar Twist

But 2M1510 b, a possible planet still awaiting confirmation, doesn’t follow this familiar pattern. If it is indeed a planet, it orbits the central brown dwarfs in a completely different plane, one that cuts across their orbital path at a sharp 90-degree angle. Imagine two spinning disks forming an X in space. That’s the kind of tilted, polar orbit scientists believe they’ve found here.

Planets that orbit two stars at once, known as “circumbinary” planets, are already quite rare. But one with such an extreme tilt? That’s something scientists had never seen—until now. Thanks to observations from the Very Large Telescope in Chile, operated by the European Southern Observatory, researchers may have just spotted the first of its kind.

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have found an exoplanet orbiting a pair of peculiar stars at an angle of 90 degrees. There have previously been hints that these so-called polar planets around two stars could exist, but we now have clear evidence that this is the case. This special system was found by observing the orbital path of the two stars being pushed and pulled in a way that could only be explained by the presence of a planet on a polar orbit. This video summarizes the discovery, explaining the nature of these peculiar stars and the method astronomers used to find this odd planet. Credit: ESO

Unraveling the Mystery With Radial Velocity

The method by which the study’s science team teased out the planet’s vertiginous existence is itself a bit of a wild ride. The candidate planet cannot be detected the way most exoplanets – planets around other stars – are found today: the “transit” method, a kind of mini-eclipse, a tiny dip in starlight when the planet crosses the face of its star.

Instead, they used the next most prolific method, “radial velocity” measurements. Orbiting planets cause their stars to rock back and forth ever so slightly, as the planets’ gravity pulls the stars one way and another; that pull causes subtle, but measurable, shifts in the star’s light spectrum. Add one more twist to the detection in this case: the push-me-pull-you effect of the planet on the two brown dwarfs’ orbit around each other. The path of the brown dwarf pair’s 21-day mutual orbit is being subtly altered in a way that can only be explained, the study’s authors conclude, by a polar-orbiting planet.

This is an animation of the exoplanet 2M1510 (AB) b’s unusual orbit around its host stars, a pair of brown dwarfs. The newly discovered planet has a polar orbit, which is perpendicular to the plane in which the two stars are traveling. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

A Rare Discovery Among Thousands

Only 16 circumbinary planets – out of more than 5,800 confirmed exoplanets – have been found by scientists so far, most by the transit method. Twelve of those were found using NASA’s now-retired Kepler Space Telescope, the mission that takes the prize for the most transit detections (nearly 2,800). Scientists have observed a small number of debris disks and “protoplanetary” disks in polar orbits, and suspected that polar-orbiting planets might be out there as well. They seem at last to have turned one up.

Explore Further: Planet Found Orbiting Two Stars at a Perfect 90-Degree Angle

An international science team led by Thomas A. Baycroft, a Ph.D. student in astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Birmingham, U.K., published a paper describing their discovery in the journal Science Advances in April 2025. The planet was entered into NASA’s Exoplanet Archive on May 1, 2025. The system’s full name is 2MASS J15104786-281874 (2M1510 for short).

Reference: “Evidence for a polar circumbinary exoplanet orbiting a pair of eclipsing brown dwarfs” by Thomas A. Baycroft, Lalitha Sairam, Amaury H. M. J. Triaud and Alexandre C. M. Correia, 16 April 2025, Science Advances.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adu0627

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