Some young suns are aligned with their planet-forming disks, others are born tilted

“All young stars have these disks, but we’ve known little about their orientations with respect to the spin axis of the host stars,” said UCSB associate physics professor Brendan Bowler, who studies how planets form and evolve through their orbits and atmospheres, and is senior author of a study in the journal Nature. Based on the general alignment of our own sun’s rotational axis with those of the planets in our solar system, the assumption was that stars and their planet-forming disks emerge and rotate in or very close to alignment, he explained.

“This work challenges these centuries-old assumptions,” Bowler said.