Why is this star so weird? Maybe because it ate one of its own planets

An illustration of a red giant star, where it glows red with heat in space.

The red giant star Kepler-56 has a really weird spin, and it may be because it consumed one of its planets.

Kepler-56 already has two known exoplanets, but they may have had a long-lost sibling, Takato Tokuno, a doctoral student in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Tokyo, concluded after analyzing the star's peculiar properties.