New star system configuration discovered

[phavoc]

I hadn't heard of this specifically before, and it came across my feed so I thought I'd share. A binary system of brown dwarfs was discovered, which is uncommon in itself. What makes this even more unusual is that there appears to be a planet orbiting perpendicular in a polar orbit (i.e. it's a vertical one vs. the normal horizontal ones. It's been thought theoretically possible, but never yet found.

Even the brown dwarfs have an odd orbit since they are in an elliptical orbit of each other, The system is called 2M1510. Astronomers are continuing to observe it, thinking they may even find a 3rd brown dwarf, making it a trinary system. The dwarfs (or at least one of them) is pretty big, estimated to be about 35x the size of Jupiter.

 

[Terry Mixon]

Scientists discover bizarre double-star system with exoplanet on a sideways orbit (video)

"A planet orbiting not just a binary, but a binary brown dwarf, as well as being on a polar orbit, is rather incredible and exciting."

www.space.com

I just know this is some super alien kid’s school project. One their parents—all five of them—help do the night before it was due.

 

[Saladman]

I was wondering if maybe the system resulted from capture rather than coalescence, but the article doesn't mention that either way.

I did find the following bit interesting, as I didn't know it:

Around 75% of stars with masses around 10 times that of the sun are in binaries, and around 50% of sun-like stars have a partner.

That's something I haven't been placing when rolling subsectors.

 

[Geir]

Around 75% of stars with masses around 10 times that of the sun are in binaries, and around 50% of sun-like stars have a partner.

And it's even less when you get to M-class dwarfs... or it's just detection bias: easier to find bright stars (and there's a decent tendency for binaries to be twin or near in size) than dim ones. Or it's just that bigger formation clouds fragment more.

The nearest brown dwarf system (Luhman 16) is a binary brown dwarf system. Could also be that smaller star binaries are easier to 'pull apart' in an encounter with another star, something probably more common in dense formation nebulas - like the Orion Nebula.

 

[rinku]

Since we now know objects can migrate over the history of a solar system, and everything tends towards equilibrium, a possible scenario here is the planet forming out of the usual contracting dust cloud in the same plane as the stars, but getting peturbed into a polar orbit over time from its interactions with them. It's possible that polar orbits might be fairly common in systems with the right binary parameters.

As far as binary formation goes, they are so very common that it's likely just chance if one big mass manages to form or two do.