14 DAY TRIAL // The more planets outside of our solar system we find, the more our view of what a solar system looks like changes. Granted, our current view is skewed by the fact that most discoveries come from Kepler, which favors larger planets orbiting close to their parent stars.
Still, if the data so far is anything to go by, our solar system is far from being average. One of the most recent discoveries that is puzzling scientists is a very tilted solar system.
That in itself is not extremely peculiar, as the dwarf planet Pluto orbits the sun at an angle to the sun's equator and to the other "real" planets in the solar system.
But astronomers found that the Kepler 56 system has three planets, all of which orbit the star at a strange angle. In fact, one planet even orbits at an angle different than the other two. The report has just been published in Science.
The two inner planets of the Kepler 56 system orbit at 45 degrees to the star's equator. They arrived at this angle under the influence of the third, more distant planet which is also significantly larger than the two.