Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2025

21 world Tatooine, have been discovered in the past years. These planets typically occupy or- bits that roughly align with the plane in which their host stars orbit each other. There have previously been hints that planets on perpen- dicular, or polar, orbits around binary stars could exist: in theory, these orbits are stable, and planet-forming discs on polar orbits around stellar pairs have been detected. How- ever, until now, we lacked clear evidence that these polar planets do exist. “I am particularly excited to be involved in detecting credible evidence that this configuration exists,” says Thomas Baycroft, a PhD student at the Univer- sity of Birmingham, UK, who led the study published in Science Advances . JULY-AUGUST 2025 ASTRO PUBLISHING T his is an artist’s impression of the exoplanet 2M1510 (AB) b’s unusual orbit around its host stars, a pair of brown dwarfs. The newly discovered planet has a polar orbit, which is perpendicular to the plane in which the two stars are travelling. Polar planets around single stars had been found before, as well as polar discs of gas and dust capable of forming plan- ets around binary stars. But thanks to ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) this is the first time we have strong evidence that such a planet ac- tually exists in a polar orbit around two stars. The two brown dwarfs appear as a single source in the sky, but astronomers know there are two of them because they periodically eclipse each other. [ESO/L. Calçada]