Newfound Planet Orbits Backwards

Summary

August 12, 2009: Researchers working for UK's Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) project in collaboration with the Geneva Observatory have announced discovering a planet that orbits its star backwards. Most planetary bodies orbit their star in the same direction as the star's rotation, but this one, WASP-17 (the seventeenth extra-solar body to be discovered by the WASP project) goes in the opposite direction. The scientists speculate that this might be the result of a collision between the planet and another body.

Source

Bibliography

1. Original article: Newfound Planet Orbits Backwards

Game and Story Use

• The retrograde planet might be the result of large scale meddling by godlike aliens. It's just the sort of thing godlike aliens like to do for laughs when they've had too many beers.
• (depending on the scale) "That's not a (moon) … that's a space station".