Artist's Impression of the Discs around the Young Stars HK Tauri A and B (IMAGE)

ESO

Artist's Impression of the Discs around the Young Stars HK Tauri A and B

Caption

This artist's impression shows a striking pair of wildly misaligned planet-forming gas discs around both the young stars in the binary system HK Tauri. ALMA observations of this system have provided the clearest picture ever of protoplanetary discs in a double star. The new result demonstrates one possible way to explain why so many exoplanets -- unlike the planets in the solar system -- came to have strange, eccentric or inclined orbits.

Credit

R. Hurt (NASA/JPL-Caltech/IPAC)

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