Wildly misaligned planet-forming gas disks have been observed by scientists around the two young stars in the binary system HK Tauri. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has been a great help for scientists to take the clearest picture ever of protoplanetary disks in a double star.

Astronomers have been able to derive results that will allow them to figure out why so many exoplanets happened to have strange, eccentric, or inclined orbits.

Most stars are known to form in binary pairs in contrast to our solitary Sun. A binary pair means two stars that are in orbit around each other. Despite being very common, binary stars have offered problems for scientists to determine where planets form in such complex environments.

ALMA has provided researchers with the best view of a star system having protoplanetary disks. The disks are mutually misaligned, said Eric Jensen from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.

Now, this clear misalignment has paved a way for researchers to gain unprecedented insight into a young binary star system, said Rachel Akeson from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "Although there have been earlier observations indicating that this type of misaligned system existed, the new ALMA observations of HK Tauri show much more clearly what is really going on in one of these systems", he added.

ALMA has not only helped researchers see the disk around HK Tauri A, but measured its rotation as well.

HK Tauri A and HK Tauri B are two companion stars. HK Tauri A has a disk, but it does not block out the starlight.