By Mark Prigg For Dailymail.com
Published: 18:48 GMT, 1 January 2019 | Updated: 18:48 GMT, 1 January 2019
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Researchers have spotted a strangely deformed protostar - and say it could shed new light on how planets form.
Using observations from the ALMA radio observatory in Chile, researchers observed, a warped disk around an infant protostar that formed just several tens of thousands of years ago.
They say it could explain the misalignment of planetary orbits in many planetary systems—including our own.
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In the latest findings, published in Nature, the group from the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research (CPR) and Chiba University in Japan discovered that L1527; an infant protostar still embedded within a cloud, has a disk that has two parts—an inner one rotating in one plane, and an outer one in a different plane.
The disk is very young and still growing.
L1527, which is about 450 light years away in the Taurus Molecular Cloud, is a good object for study as it has a disk that is nearly edge-on to our view.
The new find implies that the misalignment of planetary orbits in many planetary systems—including our own—may be caused by distortions in the
