Astronomers love hunting for exoplanets. Most planets they find, just like the ones in our solar system, orbit around their stars in roughly the same way. They’re a bit like the passengers on a carousel, with the planets all travelling around their star while it spins on its axis at the centre of the ride. But recently, a team of astronomers found a new exoplanet (called 2M1510 (AB) b) that  really surprised them…

This new exoplanet is special — its orbit looks more like a Ferris wheel! It goes up and over the top rather than around the side, travelling at a right angle to the carousel-like path we normally find. But having an unusual orbit is only part of the puzzle, and to see just how odd our new exoplanet is we also need to look at its stars.

You heard us right, not star — stars! This strange new world orbits around two stars at once, which dance around each other in what astronomers call a binary system. As if that isn’t cool enough, both of the stars in this pair are brown dwarfs — a kind of almost-star that never got big enough to ‘switch on’ its starlight.

To find something as unique as this, astronomers need a really powerful telescope. That’s why the team used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to observe these two brown dwarfs in the hopes of finding a planet. As they watched, they saw the two stars wobbling around on their orbits, and worked out that this pattern could only be caused by an exoplanet on a right-angled, ferris-wheel like path.

The astronomers who found this planet are still looking for new worlds, searching around known binary stars for even more exciting discoveries.Our Universe is full of surprises, so watch this space to see what other amazing exoplanets they might find!

Image: The picture shows an artist's recreation of the orbital paths of both brown dwarf stars, in blue, and of the unusually orbiting planet, in orange. It shows how all three objects are orbiting around a shared point in space, with the planet at a right-angle to the paths of the stars. Credits: ESO/L. Calçada