Beltway effect.
Like leaves in a whirlpool, planets around a star always orbit in the same direction. Or so astronomers thought. Now they've discovered two distinct disks of gas rotating in opposite directions around a gestating star 500 light-years away.
Because planets might arise from each gas disk, the unique system could theoretically spawn two sets of planets orbiting in opposite directions, says Anthony Remijan of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, who with Jan Hollis of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, reports the finding in a study to appear in the 1 April Astrophysical Journal. But theorist Richard Lovelace of Cornell University says that's unlikely because strong shearing motions between the disks may cancel out the spins and force the gas to fall onto the star in less than a million years--probably not enough time for big planets to assemble.
CREDIT: BILL SAXTON/NRAO/AUI/NSF
