First Tilted Solar System Found

Kepler finds first known tilted solar system

Observations from NASA's Kepler spacecraft have uncovered a 'tilted' solar system, a finding that gives clues as to how some planets come to orbit their stars on paths that are misaligned with the stars' equators, astronomers report today in Science.

The planets of Earth's Solar System formed from a flat disc of gas and dust revolving around the Sun's equator, so they all started out in nearly the same plane. Earth’s orbit makes an angle of just 7.2 degrees with the plane of the Sun’s equator.

Five years ago, however, astronomers were shocked to find planets orbiting at steep angles to their stars’ equators. Some planets even went around their suns backwards — they orbit in the opposite direction to the star’s rotation. But no one had seen a misaligned multiplanetary solar system until now.

For the latest study, astronomer Daniel Huber of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, and his colleagues looked at Kepler-56, a star roughly 860 parsecs (2,800 light years) from Earth. It has two large planets that lie in the same plane and circle closer to their sun than Mercury does to ours. Kepler detected the planets as they blocked the star's light, so their orbits are oriented edge-on to our line of sight.

“It’s a fascinating discovery,” says Amaury Triaud, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “It’s nature: you observe, and you find extraordinary stuff.”
nature

I love this kind of stuff. The universe has some strange things and we have only begun to see the tip of them. As technology improves so will our ability to broaden our understanding of the universe. I can only imagine what we will learn in the next 100 years.

Grimpachi
The planets of Earth's Solar System formed from a flat disc of gas and dust revolving around the Sun's equator, so they all started out in nearly the same plane. Earth’s orbit makes an angle of just 7.2 degrees with the plane of the Sun’s equator.

Five years ago, however, astronomers were shocked to find planets orbiting at steep angles to their stars’ equators. Some planets even went around their suns backwards — they orbit in the opposite direction to the star’s rotation. But no one had seen a misaligned multiplanetary solar system until now.

This may prove to be one of the best finds in ATS history. The cosmological creation story may well have to be rewritten based on these findings. S&F

"To find out what caused the tilting, the astronomers measured the velocity of Kepler-56 through space using the 10-metre Keck I telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. “That revealed the culprit,” Huber says: a distant body whose gravitational pull tugs the star and also tilts the planets’ orbits." www.scientificamerican.com...

From their scientific paper: "Misalignments in a broader class of systems had been predicted as a consequence of torques from wide-orbiting companions, and indeed radial velocity measurements revealed a third companion in a wide orbit in the Kepler-56 system." arxiv.org...

It is currently not known if the third companion is a planet or a brown dwarf.

If it's a brown dwarf, I wonder if it can be found using infrared imagery. VLT, come to the rescue!

This may be happening.

Earth Pilgrims - John Craig
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdTtWYoZo3Y
www.youtube.com...


This star may have encountered a denser section of space and its creating drag.

or

We may be viewing the system through highly warped space!

From the way the Galaxy arcs overhead, I thought this solar system is 'tilted' as well? My reasoning being that if this system was aligned with the galactic plain, the galaxy would be seen from the equator, straight ahead?

pikestaff
From the way the Galaxy arcs overhead, I thought this solar system is 'tilted' as well? My reasoning being that if this system was aligned with the galactic plain, the galaxy would be seen from the equator, straight ahead?

Our solar system is tilted 67 degrees from the plane of the galaxy.

However, the major planets in our solar system (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) orbit about the sun's equator fairly closely.

The OP is about another solar system, who's planets are not orbiting close to the plane of their sun's equator.

So it's two different things.

I am just throwing an idea out here as my knowledge and expertise do not line in this field. Even though I love astronomy, I still lack a lot of understanding.

Could it be plausible that a planet is struck by another passing object (large) which knocks the planet into a false rotation and orbit around its star?

DM

reply to post by Dark_Matters

Hi DM.

The planets do not have to collide.
A big one can make the small one do a 180° turn around,
by gravity and the right orbit/distances/angles. . .

Blue skies.