“To highlight why this is weird, we can just look at our own Solar System and see that all of the planets lie roughly in the same plane," said study leader Meiji Nguyen
in a press release. "It would be bizarre if, say, Jupiter just happened to be inclined 30 degrees relative to the plane that every other planet orbits in.”
It’s possible that HD106906 b formed much closer to its twin host stars, but as it traveled through the debris disk surrounding the stars, its orbit decayed. The whirling twin stars then kicked the planet further out into the system when it migrated too close. The planet was almost entirely ejected from the system, but astronomers think a passing star might have stabilized the planet’s distant orbit. Candidates for such a passing star have previously been identified using the European Space Agency’s Gaia survey satellite.
Some astronomers suspect a similar scenario may have played out in our own solar system, paving the way for the hypothetical planet dubbed Planet Nine. Proposed in 2015, the gravitational influence of Planet Nine could explain the strange orbits of a unique group of Kuiper Belt objects beyond Neptune.
Planet Nine has yet to be discovered (or even proven to exist), but HD106906 b’s strange orbit provides a compelling parallel to what researchers predict Planet Nine’s orbit would look like. Using the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers hope to gather more data on HD106906 b to understand the planet in detail and hope to find other planets in similar orbits around other stars.