Astronomers have found a planet that orbits at an angle of 90 degrees around a rare pair of peculiar stars. This is the first time we have strong evidence for one of these ‘polar planets’ orbiting a stellar pair. The surprise discovery was made using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT).
Given there are known polar planetary discs, and this orbit seems stable, wouldn’t that suggest that polar systems are formed because of some past interaction between the two stars that disrupted them from the original plane of formation?
The planet could be a capture.
Possibly. I didn’t dive in deeper to see if they even know the shape of the orbit. From my understanding a capture is very unlikely to have a near circular orbit. But planetary discs definitely aren’t captures, so something changed the stars in those.