Wildly Misaligned | Space Wallpaper

Discs Around HK Tauri A and B 1920
This stunning space wallpaper shows a striking pair of wildly misaligned planet-forming gas discs around both the young stars in the binary system HK Tauri. (Image credit: R. Hurt (NASA/JPL-Caltech/IPAC))

This stunning space wallpaper 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.

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