A cloud of dust and gas swirling around an infant star system 1,300 light-years away is like no planet-forming disc we’ve seen yet. It consists of three rings, wrapped around three stars – and all three rings have different orientations, with the innermost wildly misaligned from the other two.

It’s the first direct evidence that such misalignment – known as ‘disc tearing’, and predicted in modelling – can occur in the wild.

But, although the Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array (ALMA) has performed the most detailed observation of the system yet, it’s still unclear exactly how the disc-tearing occurred.