Professor Lewis Dartnell, Professor of Science Communication, wrote an article for BBC Sky at Night Magazine about the planets orbiting around a backwards spinning star.
In the article, Professor Lewis Dartnell wrote about our solar system and the way it works, and that astrobiologists have recently discovered extrasolar planetary systems that are misaligned. He wrote: “Our Solar System is nicely ordered. All the planets move around the Sun in more-or-less perfect circles, and all their orbits are aligned in the same plane - like marbles rolling around the same dinner plate. This is known as the plane of the ecliptic, and it's the reason why the Sun, the Moon and all the planets appear to move along the same narrow band in our skies - the zodiac. The Sun's own rotation is aligned in the same way (well, it has an axial tilt of just 7°) so that the solar equator lies along the plane of the ecliptic.
“As a molecular cloud begins collapsing, the conservation of angular momentum ensures that newly-forming protostars become surrounded by a flattened disc of gas and dust that forms planets. And so the orderly layout of our own Solar System was also the way that any other planetary systems were expected to be arranged. But as we discovered more extrasolar planetary systems we realised how wrong this is: now we know of systems where the stellar equator and the planets' orbital plane are misaligned.”
Read the full article on the BBC Sky at Night Magazine’s website.
