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

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.

One strange quality of Kepler-56 is that its outer envelope is spinning incredibly rapidly — about 10 times faster than is typical for red giant stars. On top of that, the star's core is misaligned with its outer envelope, with their spins pointing in different directions. It would be as if Earth's crust were spinning much faster and in a different direction than its mantle.

What could possibly cause that?

The simplest explanation is that the kno