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An exoplanet that orbits its star backwards has been found for the first time. The planet is also the most bloated found to date, and some astronomers suspect that both properties can be traced back to an earlier close encounter with a planetary sibling.
The solar system generally rotates like a record album, with most objects orbiting the sun in the same direction as the sun itself spins. This is thought to result from the fact that everything formed from the same natal cloud of gas and dust.
However, some objects, including a number of comets and asteroids, move in orbits that are so tilted with respect to the orbital plane of the planets that they end up travelling in the opposite direction. Astronomers think they were gravitationally thrown out of their original orbits by passing objects.”
I found the appearance of this discovery especially coincidental for me as 3 days ago I had a discussion with an ex girlfriend who had just started to devoutly believe in the Lord and creationism. Funny enough one of her supporting claims for a god-created universe was that planets spin and orbit always in the same direction. In a random universe why would they always be the same as if designed? The wonderful thing about my belief in science was that I had theories but my ego also had no problems saying ‘I don’t know, but because we haven’t discovered it yet that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist’ , that being that science is malleable and can change when new evidence presents itself whereas religion for the most part is written in stone(pun intended).
Well here we have it, a planet spinning backwards, with only 5-10% of the universe even visible to us, let alone known or understood, and countless new sciences waiting to be discovered, we have a long path of debunking religious mysteries ahead of us.
