The tilt of the Earth’s axis is what gives us our seasons. As the north and south pole alternately tilt towards the Sun, the northern and southern hemispheres alternately get hotter — creating a summer and a winter.

The axis also spins in a circle, known as the rotational precession. This changes the direction of stars in the sky — meaning that eventually the North Star will no longer be pointing north. In fact, in 13,000 years, the star of Vega in the constellation of Lyra will be at the north celestial pole instead, and a time-travelling Bear Grylls will probably get very lost.

The vernal point — the place in the sky where the Sun is when it crosses the equator in the springtime — is currently in the constellation of Pisces, but is slowly approaching Aquarius. When it gets there, astrologers reckon the “Age of Aquarius” will dawn and the world will be filled with peace and harmony, though there’s considerable argument over exactly when this was or will be — estimates range from 1447 to 3597AD.

Back to science, the Earth’s rotational precession is 23.4° over 26,000 years. But Nasa’s Kepler Space Telescope, during its routine scans of the heavens, has spotted a planet that has a rotational precession of 30° over just eleven years. That’s pretty unusual, and it’ll mean rapid and erratic changes in the seasons.

The planet has been named Kepler-413b, and is located 2,300 light years away in the constellation of Cygnus. It’s a gas giant about sixty-five times the size of Earth, and orbits a pair of orange and red dwarf stars every sixty-six days at a distance just too close to be in the habitable zone.

We see its orbit edge-on, and we can only detect the planet when it passes in front of its parent stars (which astronomers call a ‘transit’). However, because of its wobbly orbit, the planet doesn’t always transit the star, so we don’t always see it. In fact, we’re not expecting to see it again until 2020.

“What we see in the Kepler data over 1,500 days is three transits in the first 180 days (one transit every sixty-six days), then we had 800 days with no transits at all,” explained Veselin Kostov, the principal investigator on the observation. “After that, we saw five more transits in a row.”

We don’t yet know why the planet is out of alignment with its stars. It’s possible that another larger planet that we haven’t observed yet is tilting the orbit. Or perhaps a third star nearby might be gravitationally bound to the system.

“Presumably there are planets out there like this one that we’re not seeing because we’re in the unfavorable period,” said Peter McCullough, a team member from STScI and JHU. “And that’s one of the things that Kostov is researching: Is there a silent majority of things that we’re not seeing?”

The team published its results in the 29 January issue of The Astrophysical Journal.