Tilt-a-whirl planets throw astronomers for a loop

Astronomers say they’ve found a bizarre star system where two of the planetary orbits are 45 degrees out of whack, but do just fine.

The secret to the planets’ success appears to be the harmony of those misaligned orbits, plus the influence of a third object that’s even bigger and farther away from the parent star.

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So outer planet is at a steep angle, nothing greatly unusual about that.

I bet they don’t know the orbital eccentricity of the planets. I found that by far the majority of extra-solar planets found by Kepler are in highly elliptical orbits. I found this because the drop in light intensity as the planet crosses the limb of the star is very often too slow to be explained by anything other than elliptical orbits (or the planet is not a planet at all but a binary star and the light is contaminated by a different star near the line of sight).

Other things I found out by studying Kepler data are that:
2) Kepler can’t on its own distinguish between a Jupiter-sized planet and a brown dwarf.
3) Binary stars are hugely more common (by at least a factor of 20) in Kepler data than planets.
4) Because of the problems caused by highly elliptical planetary orbits and light contamination from other stars near the line of sight, only a tiny fraction, much less than 0.1%, of planets found in Kepler data are as far away from the star as the Earth is from the Sun.