Until not many years ago , scientists did n’t think planet could be around a dyad of stars . The tortuousness from thethree - consistency problemwould make most of them fluid . Yet , we ’ve establish plenty of binary systems with planets . And it seems that they can getweirderandweirder .

The system ʋ Octantis ( label nu Octantis ) should be unfriendly to planets . It contains a sub - elephantine star 57 percentage heavier than our Sun and a white gnome about 43 percent lighter .

The macrocosm of this major planet has been controversial .

A white nanus is a star remnant . It ’s the end Cartesian product of a star like the Sun running out of atomic number 1 , evolve into a ruddy heavyweight , and then escape out of the rest of the fuel . Its essence founder into a dense object and its outer layer are ball up away . What remains is a blanched nanus . This will happen to the Sun , and we will say goodbye to Mercury , Venus , and maybe even Earth when it does .

you could see why this is not ideal for planetary natural selection to begin with . So , discover a planet about twice the mass of Jupiter was quite shocking . However , that is not all . The satellite is going the wrong manner around its star compare to the clean gnome ; it is in retrograde , making this an even more funny planetary system .

“ This planet is retrograde in the horse sense that the planet goes around the primary asterisk ( nu Oct A ) in the opposite direction as the two stars go around each other , ” ProfessorMan Hoi Lee , from the University of Hong Kong , say IFLScience .

“ The existence of this planet has been controversial , because there were no data-based common law and we gestate planets to mould in prograde electron orbit if they mold at the same prison term as the star . ”

The first hint that the system might have a major planet come in 2004 , with evidence from co - generator David Ramm . Using 18 years ' Charles Frederick Worth of observation , the squad was able to confirm the planet ’s existence and also consider how the whole system works . They also studied the companion star and confirmed that it was a lily-white nanus .

Thanks to the information pull together , the scientist have estimated that the system work 2.9 billion years ago . The progenitor of the clean dwarf was a lot crowing than the Sun , so it evolveda lot more quick . They conceive that the planet did not mold with the stars , but after the whitened midget lost its layer .

“ The breakthrough that the secondary star ( nu Oct B ) is a livid dwarf means that the binary has evolved significantly in terms of the mass of nu Oct B and the orbit of the binary star . When nu Oct B evolved into a white gnome about 2 billion years ago , the planet could have formed in a retrograde disc of material around nu Oct A accreted from the mass ejected by nu Oct B , or it could [ have been ] captured from a prograde orbit around the binary program into a retrograde arena around nu Oct A , ” Professor Lee told IFLScience .

system like ʋ Octantis push the gasbag of what ’s possible in the world – planet forming 1000000000000 of yr after their stars , from the layers of a dead wizard and not aprotoplanetary platter , and even going the wrong mode orotund .

The cogitation , led by Mr Ho Wan Cheng , is published in the journalNature .