An exoplanet that orbits its star backwards has been found for the first time. The planet is also the most bloated found to date, and some astronomers suspect that both properties can be traced back to an earlier close encounter with a planetary sibling.
The solar system generally rotates like a record album, with most objects orbiting the sun in the same direction as the sun itself spins. This is thought to result from the fact that everything formed from the same natal cloud of gas and dust.
However, some objects, including a number of comets and asteroids, move in orbits that are so tilted with respect to the orbital plane of the planets that they end up travelling in the opposite direction. Astronomers think they were gravitationally thrown out of their original orbits by passing objects.
Three extrasolar planets have previously been found on orbits that are tilted with respect to the plane they should have been born in. But now, a planet called WASP-17b has been found on an orbit that is so tilted – by about 150° – that it is moving in the opposite direction to the spin of its star.
"All the others have been going in more or less the right direction, just tilted at crazy angles," says team member Andrew Collier Cameron of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. WASP-17b, which lies 1000 light years away from Earth, is "pretty weird", he told New Scientist. "It really throws the cat among the pigeons."
http://www.newscientist.com/mobile/arti ... -time.htmlGoing back to my original post, some people are throwing out theories that this is nibiru that had crashed into earth and is now revolving backwards as was depicted in the Sumerian tablets. Far fetched of course but it is still impressive that human beings had knowledge of these things back then.
