Astronomers have always struggled to understand how planets form in binary star systems. Early models suggested that the gravitational tug-of-war between two stellar bodies would send young planets into eccentric orbits, possibly ejecting them completely from their home system or crashing them into each other. Observational evidence, however, reveals that planets do indeed form and maintain surprisingly stable orbits around double stars.
To better understand how such systems evolve, astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimetre/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) took a new, detailed look at the planet-forming disc around HD 142527, a binary star about 450 light-years from Earth in a cluster of young stars known as the Scorpius–Centaurus Association.
The HD 142527 system consists of a main star a little more than twice the mass of our Sun...
