No, these are not two rings each set with a diamond, as depicted in this artist's rendering, but a sight of far greater rarity: a planet orbiting at a 90-degree angle around a pair of stars. When an exoplanet is found in a binary star system – which indeed exists – its orbit is generally aligned with the plane in which its two hosts revolve around each other. A perpendicular orbit was theoretically anticipated, but this is the first time astronomers have reported solid evidence of such a phenomenon. The discovery of this "polar planet," made using the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, was published in Science Advances on April 16. Another astonishing rarity is that these two stars are brown dwarfs that eclipse each other from Earth's perspective. This "eclipsing brown dwarf pair," only the second known, was discovered in 2018.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.