all it says? Is that what you think?"

She realized the research was missing the strengths people she grew up with exhibited, such as creative problem-solving skills and abilities to navigate social hierarchies and read people.

This helped motivate DeJoseph, who is now a developmental psychologist at University of Denver, to try to tell the other side of the story. "I felt like there was more to say about children and family strengths in those contexts that just wasn't being told yet."

Now, along with a handful of other researchers, DeJoseph aims to understand the full spectrum of changes that come with growing up in dangerous, deprived or unpredictable environments.

That is not to say that growing up in poverty is all flowers and roses, DeJoseph stressed. "Growing up in poverty is very hard and does cause a lot of challenges and does increase risk for things that we don't want," she said. But "the other side of it was missing." It's about capturing the full picture, not romanticizing hardship, she added.

Indeed, this balanced perspective does not deny that growing up in adversity — a catchall term that encompasses, for example, neglect, exposure to household or community violence, and household instability — can be damaging or even traumatizing. Rather, the approach acknowledges that individuals raised in such environments may also develop specialized skills that have previously been overlooked or discounted by researchers.

They hope that an understanding of these skills can eventually lead to changes in the educational system that will help narrow achievement gaps between those who grew up facing adversity and those who didn't.

An impoverished view of childhood adversity

Research has repeatedly shown extensive mental health disparities between individuals who faced adversity in childhood and those who do not. For example, children who experience multiple forms of adversity ‪—‬ such as lacking access to basic necessities or enduring aggression or neglect ‪—‬ in early childhood are more likely to be anxious and depressed at age 15. This affects a significant fraction of the population: 16.3% of U.S. children live in poverty, according to a 2022 report by the U.S. Census Bureau, and around 15% experienced neglect or abuse, according to a 2015 estimate.

However, under the prevailing "deficit model" of childhood adversity, experiencing multiple stressors as a young child does nothing but harm brain development. The fact that children from disadvantaged backgrounds score lower, on average, on standardized tests of various cognitive abilities has been used to support this view.

The deficit model is "really stigmatizing and really disrespectful" to people from disadvantaged backgrounds, Bruce Ellis, a professor of psychology and anthropology, heads the Developmental Adaptation, Stress, and Health (DASH) Lab at the University of Utah, told Live Science.

What's more, it "doesn't make any sense from an evolutionary perspective," he said. "Stress should not so much impair development as direct or regulate it towards strategies that are adaptive under stressful conditions."

Even the slightly more hopeful "resilience model," which looks at why some people can overcome adversity to become healthy and successful, focuses on why some people flourish despite experiencing early hardships.

Instead, Ellis and his colleagues have developed what they call an evolutionary developmental perspective. Unlike the resilience or deficit models, both of which frame adversity as solely negative, their framework looks at adversity as a selective pressure that pushes people to develop specialized abilities so they are better equipped to thrive in the environments they grew up in.

"Instead of doing well despite adversity, it's showing a potentially adaptive outcome because of adversity," DeJoseph said.

Humans evolved to be adaptable

From birth, an infant's biology, psychology and behavior are fine-tuned to suit the environment in which they are raised. This adaptability is partly due to genes being switched on differently depending on the environment the individual grows up in during sensitive periods of development, like in early childhood. As a result, people become specialized to their particular setting.

Stress, violence, chaos, hunger and scarcity have been a part of the human experience at many points throughout evolutionary history, so the ability to adapt and thrive when faced with such challenges has likely played a huge role in what it means to be human across time.

In principle, that means that individuals who face adversity early in life are "stress-adapted," meaning they've developed skills and traits that allow them to survive in their harsh and unpredictable settings, such as facing housing instability or living with an abusive caregiver.

In this view, social and cognitive skills that improve the individual's chances of surviving in harsh and unpredictable environments are likely to be more common in people who come from such environments.

The strengths-based approach

But what are these skills? Research has shown a handful of abilities that seem to be enhanced in people who were raised in stressful or chaotic environments. Psychologists initially called these "hidden talents."

Researchers hypothesize that these skills, such as heightened memory for faces and the ability to shift attention quickly, are useful in such environments.

For example, the ability to shift attention quickly may be important when you don't know when or where the next danger could be. "The assumption is, when you're in an unpredictable world where, again, threat can come without warning, where things can change unpredictably, that it's really important to be able to kind of fluidly unstick your attention from one thing and shift to something else, as opposed to being really good at sustaining attention," Ellis said.

In contrast, the ability to focus one's attention on a single task for long periods may be adaptive for someone who can rely on feeling safe; they have learned that they can tune out the outside world without worrying about something bad happening.

Suppressing impulses and resisting temptations based on the promise of future benefits might not be helpful in changeable environments, where rewards are fleeting and may not come around often, DeJoseph said.

Nowadays, to avoid the implication that people who faced childhood adversity have no need of support, researchers tend to call these "stress-adapted skills" rather than "hidden talents," DeJoseph said.

In fact, many of these adaptations that enable children to survive or thrive in stressful or unpredictable settings may still have downsides. For instance, being very attuned to threats may increase your chance of surviving in dangerous environments, but hypervigilance can lead to heightened anxiety in safe environments.

"It might help a child function in one context but create a challenge in another," DeJoseph said.

Uncovering stress-adapted skills

This budding field is "still very broad," and researchers are still mapping out the repertoire of skills that emerge from adversity, DeJoseph said. But a flurry of research has begun to home in on some of those skills.

For example, memory for who has more power in a given situation may be enhanced because understanding who sits where in the social pecking order, including who is more likely to win in a physical fight, is critical for surviving in harsh or dangerous environments. And being quicker to identify patterns in the environment could mean individuals are able to anticipate and spot threats or opportunities in changeable circumstances.

However, it is now clear that some stress-adapted skills require a bit of coaxing to reveal themselves. That's because these skills are specific to the contexts in which they developed, Ellis said, meaning they are more likely to appear in threatening or uncertain situations.

For example, the capacity to update information you are holding in your mind — known as "working memory updating" — is key for tracking incoming information and ensuring it is up-to-date. In a study involving 372 adults, individuals were randomly assigned to read a fake news article that either highlighted economic uncertainty or discussed computer technology. After reading these news clips, the participants completed working-memory-updating tasks.

Participants who reported having more unpredictable childhoods and read about economic uncertainty tended to be better at updating their working memory than children with more stable upbringings. But the results flipped for those who had unpredictable childhoods and read about computer technology. This suggests the ability to detect and quickly process information in a changeable environment can shine in situations that may call for it, the researchers suggested.

Context is key, but so is the content of the testing. For instance, almost all early studies used standardized tests that relied heavily on abstract questions, which may have missed some of the nuances of stress-adapted skills, Tochukwu Nweze, a developmental cognitive psychologist and co-director of the DASH Lab at the University of Utah, told Live Science. Now, some studies are using familiar, real-life stimuli rather than abstract stimuli, like numbers, shapes or colors, he said.

A 2022 study found that teenagers who had been exposed to high levels of violence and poverty in the past scored lower when generic shapes, like squares and triangles, were used, but almost caught up to peers who experienced relatively lower adversity when more relevant shapes, like buses, dollar bills and faces were used.

In fact, a recently published study found that children in the Scampia neighborhood of Naples, Italy — which faces high crime rates, toxic waste pollution, economic marginalization and institutional neglect — showed enhanced working memory and short-term memory compared with kids from a relatively higher socioeconomic neighborhood, but only when the tasks involved remembering faces.

Mixed results and known unknowns

Because this is a young field, mixed results are cropping up everywhere. For example, research on 800 Dutch adults found inconsistent links between current adverse environments and performance on working-memory tasks. Other research from the same team also revealed that exposure to threats in childhood and adulthood was associated with slower information processing across a range of tasks but was not linked with the ability to suppress impulsive actions or quickly shift attention.

These mixed findings highlight the essential need to replicate some of the core findings of the field. No studies in this area have been conducted on older adults, so researchers have no idea how stable these skills are throughout someone's life, Ellis said.

Moreover, as with a lot of other psychological research, the studies into stress-adapted skills have been conducted predominantly in "WEIRD" populations — that is, with people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies. People from non-WEIRD populations have been "grossly understudied," Nweze said, and there must be a concerted effort to correct this imbalance. "There is a need to understand whether there is cultural generalizability of these findings," he said.

In an attempt to do so, Nweze has investigated some of these ideas in his home country of Nigeria. For example, in a 2020 study, he and his colleagues compared 53 children in orphanages or foster homes with 51 children being raised by their biological parents. The team used standard psychological tests to assess these children's abilities to hold information in their mind and suppress impulses.

The children living in orphanages or foster homes performed either just as well as or better than the children living with their biological parents. These results were surprising because they bucked the trend of prior studies finding that institutionalized children were worse at inhibiting their impulses, Nweze said.

Similar results have recently been found in Mozambique, with children from a high-stress community outperforming kids from a relatively lower-stress town on social memory tasks.

What's not clear is how a dangerous, deprived or highly changeable childhood mediates these changes in the brain.

Early life adversity shapes brain development

One researcher who is trying to map out those brain differences is Christopher Monk, a professor of psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience at the University of Michigan.

Monk and his team have found that 15-year-olds who had been exposed to relatively high levels of adversity throughout childhood had different neural connectivity than teens with comparatively low or medium exposure. Adversity in this context included experiences such as exposure to emotional and physical abuse, and to neighborhood and parental violence.

MRI brain scans revealed that kids who had been exposed to cumulatively higher levels of adversity had denser connectivity in the default mode network, which is most active when the brain is not focused on external stimuli, such as during daydreaming. They also had denser connectivity in the frontoparietal network, which is involved in problem-solving and planning.

The salience network ‪—‬ which includes the amygdala, the region involved in processing danger and emotions‪ —‬ was less densely connected.

Although the environment "truly does sculpt the brain," these brain changes are not necessarily good or bad, Monk told Live Science. "They just are what they are. The brain is just always adapting to the environment."

Because it is impossible — and unethical — to randomly allocate children to high- and low-adversity settings, these studies can't show that adversity causes these brain differences. "We're not able to talk about causation," Monk said. "We're talking about one point in time correlating with another point in time."

Also, it's still not clear how differences seen in brain scans translate to stress-adapted skills and abilities. Partly, that's because most neuroscience research has not been focused on these hidden strengths. Instead, it has focused on how childhood adversity harms brain structure and function, often with the goal of explaining the higher incidence of depression, anxiety, impulsiveness and aggression in those who had stressful childhoods.

"New studies could incorporate appropriate measures to specifically test for the neural bases of hidden talents and their development," Ellis and his colleagues wrote in a book on hidden talents.

The $64,000 question

Although some of these stress-adapted skills may emerge when kids navigate changeable, stressful environments, many of these children will wind up leaving those environments later in life. So how can society leverage the skills of stress-adapted people to help them thrive in an environment that may be very different from the one they grew up in?

Although the research is intriguing, experts acknowledged that it isn't robust enough yet to show exactly which skills stress brings out — let alone to inform policy or educational recommendations. "I feel like we need to get the science a bit more solid before it makes sense to put those in real-world settings," DeJoseph said.

But experts agreed that schools are the easiest places to start based on what is already known. The hope is for researchers to work with school curriculum development staff and teaching experts to replace abstract concepts with more meaningful materials. "That's where one policy could potentially have manifestable impacts," Nweze said.

Ellis said the discovery that some skills can be equalized or enhanced when the right materials or contexts are employed could be the answer to "the $64,000 question, or more like the $64 billion question: how do you address the disparity in educational success and career success among people from rich versus poor backgrounds?"

Still, simply moving away from assumptions that individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are "broken" could have a positive impact.

When researchers ran a series of sessions for educators at two U.S. universities in which they described the strengths of kids who had faced economic hardship, they found that educators had more positive beliefs about their more marginalized undergraduate students.

"Perhaps most strikingly, economically marginalized students earned grades that were more than a quarter of a grade point higher, on average, in courses taught by educators who participated in the strength-based learning group compared to those in the control group," the study authors wrote in the paper. This translated to a difference between a C+ and a B-, which was achieved not by changing curriculum but simply helping teachers better understand their students' identities and strengths.

"This perspective change seems so simple," DeJoseph said, "but it seems to have a real impact."

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'> Adversity shaped our evolution as a species. People raised in it may have underrecognized strengths because of it.

Earlier this summer, Claude — Anthropic’s AI model — attempted to find a solution to what's widely considered one of the most important unsolved math problems. Known as the Riemann hypothesis, it proposes a hidden order behind the apparently random distribution of prime numbers.

And while the bot's attempt failed, it did make a huge leap in progress on a related problem. Now, Youness Lamzouri, an expert in this field at the University of Lorraine in France, has not only confirmed Claude's progress using a different and more intuitive approach but also gone further, obtaining fresh knowledge linked to how prime numbers are distributed.

"It's like you have an archaeological site and you bring in big machines and they extract a treasure because this is what we want: the artifact," Lamzouri told Live Science. "But humans usually do it very carefully because they want to understand how it came to be that this artifact is buried there — this is what happened with Claude and me."

A prime target

Understanding the importance of Lamzouri's discovery requires some context. Almost a month after OpenAI loudly (and controversially) released a proof for the Navier–Stokes existence-and-completeness problem created by around 10,000 of its AI agents, human mathematicians are still trying to figure out if it is correct and whether it adds anything to human understanding.

And this is a big concern. The Navier-Stokes problem is one of seven fiendishly difficult Millennium Prize Problems posed by the Clay Mathematics Institute in the year 2000. The purpose of setting these problems was not just for mathematicians to solve them by brute-force computation, but to invent new techniques and promote understanding that would boost a wide range of related fields.

If humans don't understand the proof and can't find anything useful in it — as seems to be the case for OpenAI's Navier-Stokes proof — it holds little value to mathematicians. This is why Anthropic’s failed attempt at solving the Riemann hypothesis — another Millennium Prize Problem — could be a much more interesting story.

On Aug. 10, Anthropic published a preprint paper and accompanying blog post describing how an unreleased version of the company’s AI model Claude attempted to prove (or disprove) the Riemann hypothesis.

First proposed by German mathematician Bernhard Riemann in 1859, the Riemann hypothesis is focused on the prime numbers (numbers with factors of only 1 and themselves) whose spacing doesn't seem to follow a regular pattern on a number line. Riemann discovered that the secret to this spacing is locked inside the Riemann zeta function.

The Riemann hypothesis suggests that all of the (non-trivial) zeroes of the Riemann zeta function lie on a single vertical line when plotted out. If true, it would confirm rules and limit the apparent randomness of the spacing of prime numbers ‪—‬ a finding that would have profound implications throughout mathematics and cryptography.

When Anthropic human operator Jarred Sumner first prompted Claude to solve the Riemann hypothesis in late July, Claude attempted over 600 lines of attack. At the beginning of the next session, in August, Sumner offered the AI some words of encouragement: "Take a big leap of faith in your capabilities." Claude's response was curt: "That's not a confidence problem I can fix by believing harder."

Feeling like they'd hit a brick wall, the human-AI team set sights on a more realistic objective. "When you find a huge mountain, like the Riemann hypothesis, and you cannot prove it, then you settle on lower objectives," Lamzouri said. In this case, the more attainable peak was figuring out the minimum proportion of zeroes that sit on the vertical line. Since 1989, mathematicians have known that at least 40% of the zeroes are on the line. Claude achieved 67.25%.

Though a huge leap and impressive achievement, this result is not progress towards solving the Riemann hypothesis. This is because of a subtlety in mathematics that means that even if almost every zero lies on the critical line, there could still be exceptions. And the Riemann hypothesis demands absolute certainty, no exceptions.

This is why for James Maynard, a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford who was a co-winner of the 2022 Fields Medal (math's equivalent of a Nobel Prize) for critical breakthroughs in areas related to the Riemann hypothesis, it is not the “headline percentage” that excites him. "The thing that I am very positive about is that there's new ideas in the Claude proof that are more directly interacting with the problem," he told Live Science.

In contrast, when Lamzouri read the paper, he was disappointed. "After a couple of hours, I gave up," he said. "There was something in there, but it was too complicated — it was not human." So, instead of continuing to grapple with the paper, Lamzouri decided to read all of the published articles that the Anthropic team stated that Claude had heavily drawn from in its proof. He then spotted something Claude hadn't.

Lamzouri realized that a lot of the proof's complicated mathematics could be bypassed by adding a certain constraint on the equations. From this, he produced a different proof that delivered the same proportion of zeroes on the line, 67.25%, but in a much more straightforward way. What's more, his approach allowed him to prove additional facts, such as that the percentage of zeroes that are no good at all (not simple and not on the line) is at most 11%.

"Youness' argument reframes everything in a conceptually clearer way for people who are working in the field," said Maynard, who was not involved in either study. "I view this as a positive example of one way that things can progress going forward in light of AI."

On this point, Lamzouri agrees with Maynard. "The good thing is that once I discovered this new way of looking at things — which was, of course, inspired by Claude — it gave me ideas that I hope to develop in related areas," he said. "I think it's going to be a similar thing in other areas of math: that AI discovers things, puts people on the path to looking at concepts from a different perspective, and hopefully, humans will continue pushing for understanding."

'> 'This is what happened with Claude and me': AI's failed attempt to crack the Riemann hypothesis led mathematician to a breakthrough

A Canadian telescope designed to chart the distribution of hydrogen gas across the ancient universe has proved it can do so using only its own data for the first time, without the help of other telescopes. The results took seven years to prove, but the payoff could be huge.

According to the authors of a new study published Monday (Sept. 28) in The Astrophysical Journal, the telescope could give scientists a new, cost-effective way to study dark energy, the poorly understood force that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate over time.

"Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and the raw material from which stars form," study co-author Arnab Chakraborty, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, said in a statement. "Its faint radio emission acts like a cosmic tracer, revealing how matter is distributed across space."

The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is a set of radio telescopes, principally located near Penticton, British Columbia, that map the entire northern sky every day. Before the results from the new study, CHIME had to confirm its own observations with other telescopes — an expensive and time-consuming process.

It was important for CHIME to look at the universe's ancient hydrogen gas with its own data, to serve as an independent point of measurement that did not rely on other telescopes, the team explained. The new paper, which was nearly a decade in the making, is based on 94 nights of observations in 2019 that were carefully double-checked before publication. The telescope can detect radio signals as far back as 3 billion years after the Big Bang, when the universe was a fraction of its current age.

"We worked very hard to convince ourselves that this wasn't a false alarm," Chakraborty said. "After all the tests, the signal remained. That gave us confidence we were seeing real hydrogen from the distant universe."

An accompanying paper published in The Astrophysical Journal includes more information about where hydrogen is found in the cosmos. This study suggests that about 2% of hydrogen is "neutrally atomic" — meaning the atoms contain a balance of just one proton and one electron, resulting in no overall electric charge — which is "broadly consistent" with measurements by other telescopes, Shabbir Shaikh, a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University and a co-author of both papers, said in the statement.

Mapping the distribution of this common gas could reveal new clues about the expansion of the universe at different times in cosmic history. In future research, the team plans to go through CHIME's other seven years of observations to gather more information about its hydrogen gas studies.

'> CHIME telescope unlocks new way to study the universe's baffling expansion super El Niño, is creeping up the Pacific coast of Central and North America and will soon reach California's shores, where it could raise sea levels by up to 1 foot (30 centimeters) for months, researchers warn.

Kelvin waves are a well-known, planetary-scale ocean phenomenon, but this particular forecast has experts worried because it will likely amplify the damage from severe storms, storm surges, flooding and coastal erosion that the record-shattering El Niño is expected to bring this winter.

In general, a Kelvin wave is a swell wave that spans thousands of miles and balances Earth's rotation, David Webb, a physical oceanographer at the National Oceanography Centre in the U.K., told Live Science in an email. But the waves generated during El Niño years are not normal Kelvin waves, because they cause oscillations of a boundary within the ocean as well as a height increase at the surface. In particular, these waves trigger the border between warmer, less-dense surface water and colder, denser bottom layers to move up and down within about 330 feet (100 m). For this reason, these El Niño-driven waves are called internal Kelvin waves.

Internal Kelvin waves are triggered by changes in surface winds around the equator in the far-western Pacific Ocean. Specifically, westerly wind bursts weaken the background trade winds that blow from South America toward Asia, thereby allowing warm water and elevated sea states that occur in the far-western Pacific to slowly "slosh" eastward.

In this case, "the generation process will have involved changes in the winds at different locations and at different times, so it may not be a particularly clean single wave — possibly a bit messy," Webb said.

Once an internal Kelvin wave kicks off, researchers can track its advance along the equator and predict when it will hit the South American coastline. The wave can't go farther east than that, so it spreads into two branches — known as coastal trapped waves — that continue north and south for thousands of miles at a speed of around 6 mph (10 km/h). This means California is not uniquely exposed to the current wave; all of the countries and regions that border the eastern Pacific Ocean are vulnerable, Webb said.

In California and elsewhere, the influence of the internal Kelvin wave will be in addition to the tides, regardless of whether El Niño sparks storm activity there. "What is most likely to be seen is a period, or maybe a few weeks, when the normal [pattern] of tides and tidal currents is distorted, with both high and low tides being higher than normal," Webb said, adding that tides could rise by "tens of centimeters," or about a foot.

The problem is that higher tides magnify the impacts of storms, which are more likely in some parts of the U.S. during an El Niño, Kate Huckelbridge, executive director of the California Coastal Commission, wrote in a Sept. 11 memo. The memo was sent to warn coastal California homeowners and residents to prepare for extreme conditions, such as flooding.

"A key observation from past El Niño events is that the most damaging storms are often those that coincide with the highest tides," Huckelbridge wrote. "Storms that peak during high tides are far more likely to cause damage than if the same storm peaked during low tide."

Storms alone can raise coastal sea levels by more than 3 feet (1 m), Webb noted, and sea levels have already increased by at least 8 inches (20 cm) due to climate change. Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in response to experts' weather predictions so the state could mobilize equipment and resources before storms strike, The Guardian reported Monday (Sept. 28).

Several internal Kelvin waves can occur within a single El Niño event, with the largest waves typically recorded in the winter. However, Webb said he doubts there will be more than one full wave this time.

'> Powerful 'Kelvin wave' triggered by super El Niño threatens to raise sea levels off the California coast for months

Astronomers have discovered a few exoplanets with retrograde orbits before; these orbits often happen when the gravitational attraction of other massive objects in their star systems scrambles the planets' orbits. However, this newly discovered planetary system doesn't seem to have any massive objects that could have changed the retrograde planet's orbit, researchers reported in a study published Sept. 21 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

"We looked for the kind of massive companion that could have forced the planet into such an extreme orbit," study co-author Yann Carteret, an astronomer at the University of Geneva, said in a statement. "We may need to think differently about how this system acquired its unusual architecture."

A planetary mystery

For their new study, the researchers analyzed 23 hours of observations from two exoplanet-hunting instruments installed on a 12-foot-wide (3.6 meters) telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile. They saw the retrograde planet cross in front of its star 10 times. Each time it passed in front of the star, the starlight reaching Earth dimmed a little. Measuring the extent and duration of that dimming revealed the planet's size and information about its orbit.

What made this detection particularly difficult was the type of star: an M dwarf. These stars are small, relatively cool and so dim that even the closest M dwarf stars to Earth can't be seen with the naked eye. About three-quarters of the stars in the Milky Way are M dwarfs, so studying them is particularly important for understanding our galaxy's exoplanets.

The star system in question is made of two, or possibly three, planets smaller than Neptune, each of which takes less than 16 days to orbit the star. GJ 3090 b is the innermost planet, completing an orbit about once every 2.9 days. Its orbit is one of the most misaligned ones scientists have detected so far, at a whopping 136 degrees out of alignment with the star's spin, making the planet nearly upside down ‪—‬ similar to Venus in our solar system.

Because GJ 3090 b is the planet closest to the star, it's unlikely that its orbit was disturbed by a massive planet or a hidden binary star; the other planets in the system are not upside down. And because they're farther from the star, a large gravitational disruption would probably affect them more, not less.

Instead, the researchers suggested that the unusual planet may have simply been born upside down. If a lot of gas and dust from outside the star system got sucked into the system, it might have replaced the protoplanetary disk with a second, newer disk at a different angle to the original, which could have formed the retrograde planet. The amount of material making up the inner planets (formed from the dusty, gaseous disk) is less than the amount that would pull on the star's spin enough to make the star change its rotational direction, keeping the system in a balanced misalignment, the researchers explained.

"The idea that a planetary system could be rebuilt from a second, differently oriented disk is particularly exciting," Vincent Bourrier, an astronomer at the University of Geneva and co-author of the study, said in the statement. "It suggests that the environment around a young star can play a much bigger role in determining the architecture of its planets than we might have expected."

'> Astronomers discover 'backward' planet orbiting its star in the wrong direction