Astronomers have discovered a "titled" solar system, and the finding might tilt science on its head.

Researchers using images from from NASA's Kepler spacecraft have uncovered a 'tilted' solar system, and the finding may shake up our understanding of how planets come to orbit their stars. In the new solar system, the planets are on paths that are skewed from the stars' equator.

In Earth's solar system, planets formed from a flat disc of dust and gaseous elements. Thus, the equators are aligned with the stars, or the most part.

However, astronomers have now discovered planets orbiting at angles that are steeply misaligned from their stars. Certain planets even go around the sun backwards-they orbit opposite to the direction the star rotates.

Until now, though, no one has spotted a multiplanetary  solar system that's mis-aligned. All that has changed.

The study was on Kepler-56, which is a star about 2,800 light years, or 860 parsecs, from Earth. The star has two large planets on the same plane, which circle closer to the sun than Mercrury.

Kepler's observations of the planets as they blocked the star's light revealed that the plane of the star's equator tilts 45 degrees to the planets' orbits. "It was a big surprise," Huber says.

Kepler-56 is a giant star, emitting nine times more light than our Sun. To determine how the star was oriented, researchers studied variations in its brightness, which vary depending on if the star is viewed from its equator, its pole, or points between.

Space.com explained further,

"To find out what caused the tilting, the astronomers measured the velocity of Kepler-56 through space using the 10-metre Keck I telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. "That revealed the culprit," Huber says: a distant body whose gravitational pull tugs the star and also tilts the planets' orbits. Despite the enormous tilt, the planets' orbits stay aligned with each other because they're in resonance: one planet takes twice as long as the other to circle the star, so they periodically nudge each other through their gravity. Their orbits therefore remain co-planar even as they deviate radically from the star's equator."

 "It's a fascinating discovery," says Amaury Triaud, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "It's nature: you observe, and you find extraordinary stuff."