Birmingham, April 18 -- Astronomers have found a planet that orbits at an angle of 90 degrees around a rare pair of peculiar stars.

This is the first time that strong evidence for one of these 'polar planets' orbiting a stellar pair.

The surprise discovery was made using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT).

Several planets orbiting two stars at once, like the fictional Star Wars world Tatooine, have been discovered in the past years.

These planets typically occupy orbits that roughly align with the plane in which their host stars orbit each other.

There have previously been hints that planets on perpendicular, or polar, orbits around binary stars could exist: in theory, these orbits are stable, and planet-f...