Astronomers have discovered a strange planetary system around the red dwarf star LHS 1903 that challenges long-held ideas about how planets form. While scientists expected planets to follow a familiar pattern, with small rocky worlds close to the star and gas giants farther away, this system appears "inside out," featuring a puzzling sequence of rocky, gaseous, gaseous, and then rocky again. Researchers believe the outer rocky planet may have formed after the system's gas supply was depleted, unlike the standard model in which planets form together inside a gas-rich protoplanetary disc. The discovery, made using data from multiple telescopes including the Cheops space telescope, suggests planets can form in ways never previously observed and adds to growing evidence from more than 6,000 known exoplanets that planetary formation theories based on our Solar System may need to be reconsidered.