Spinning an Unusual Planetary News Cycle

Last week was an active one at the "orbituary" desks of media outlets worldwide.

A first-of-its-kind discovery was announced telling of a distant planet whose spin defies the expected pattern of an orbit that goes in the same direction in which its star rotates.

Just one day later, two independent teams concurrently discovered the same strange and altogether different planet, and it's the second one with a notion for rejection of rotational convention.

Members of the astronomical community find that the rapid-fire round of discoveries has left their heads spinning.

In the first announced finding, a planet was found to demonstrate a direction of spin opposing the rotational direction of the star it orbits. The initial working hypothesis is that the high gravitational force exerted by a just-barely averted collision between the planet and a large passing object could explain the aberrant rotation.

The second finding, coming simultaneously from one team at M.I.T. in Massachusetts and a second in Japan, is of a planet whose orbit is approximately around its star's poles instead of around its equator, where velocity of spin is greatest. An explanation for the second planet's strange orbit has not yet been offered, and this may be related to the discrepancy between the sets of measurements taken by the two teams.

And rather than resorting to competition-fueled dope slaps and fistacuffs until every one's left seeing stars, the two groups will play nice. They've announced their intent to compare notes and work concurrently to refine their measurements and work toward sharing the duties involved in better understanding and explaining this week's second planetary oddity.

Image courtesy of NASA, via Wikimedia Commons