Scientists have discovered a rare perpendicular solar system

That’s not how looking at things or perpendicularity work…

There is no angle where our solar system looks like it has any polar orbiting planets, because none of our planets have a polar orbit.

The sun spins about its axis, and the equator of the sun describes a plane, or disc. This disc is the same plane (on average) that the protostellar/protoplanetary disc that formed our solar system span in.

As dust and gas coalesced to form the sun, everything kept orbiting along that plane.

This is due to the conservation of momentum inherent to spacetime and matter.

For there to be a planet that has an orbit far outside that plane, it would have to come from some other solar system and been captured, or some unimaginable force must have pushed their orbits into the high inclination after forming along the orbital plane, or something must have interacted with the star to incline the plane of its own rotation.

“Maybe we’re the perpendicular ones” is about as sensical as saying “the real coplanar orbits were the friends we made along the way.”

2 Likes