The Weirdest Planets Ever Found

There are a lot of planets we have discovered, and a lot of them are valuable for scientific research because they are weird.

1. 55 Cancri e

55 Cancri e is a super-Earth, about 1.9 times as wide as Earth. That’s doesn’t sound weird but it orbits so close to its star that a year on it is only 0.7 days. Due to its abundance of carbon, it is largely made of diamonds. But this might surprise you. It is also a lava world with sparkling skies due to the silicates in its atmosphere. Sounds crazy, right?

2. WASP-12 b

WASP-12 b is a hot Jupiter, meaning that it is hot and large at the same time. It is about 1.9 times as wide as Jupiter so it is one of the largest planets ever discovered. Its orbit only takes 1.1 days and the star tidally locked it. That means one side always faces its star and the other is in eternal darkness. Its shape is like an egg because the star pulled it in. In about 10 million years, the planet will be completely eaten. Also, it only reflects less than 10% of starlight, making it one of the blackest planets in the Universe.

3. Venus

Venus is the brightest planet in the night sky and it’s a hell. Despite being farther than Sun than Mercury, it is much hotter, at around 470 degrees on the surface. It has an enormous greenhouse effect due to the abundance of CO2. In reality, its atmosphere is 92 times denser than Earth’s and 95% of it is CO2. Also, it spins backwards very slowly, with a day longer than its year, and it has no moons, even though it is where it’s supposed to have.

4. Uranus

Uranus is the seventh planet from Sun and its axis makes it one of the strangest planets. Its axial tilt is about 98 degrees, meaning it spins vertically. Also, its magnetic poles are 60 degrees away from its axial pole. Uranus is barely visible to the naked eye if the sky is very dark and it is 20 astronomical units from Sun. Therefore, it is a very cold planet with temperatures lower than -220 degrees celsius at the lowest.

5. GJ 504 b

GJ 504 b is a strange pink planet. Although it is 44 astronomical units from its star, its temperature is about 237 degrees celsius. That’s because it is still young, at about 160 million years old, it still glows from the heat left from its formation. Its mass is 4 Jupiters and it is about the same size as Jupiter. Also, it is the least massive planet to be directly imaged.

6. TRES-2 b

TRES-2 b is also a hot Jupiter, but it is unusually dark, even blacker than WASP-12 b. It only reflects about 1% of the light that hits it. It is a bit larger than Jupiter and its temperature, along with 55 Cancri e and WASP-12 b, is about 2,000 K. Coincidentally, it is also the first planet in the Kepler catalogue as Kepler-1 b.

7. KOI-55 b

Have you ever heard of a planet hotter than Sun’s surface? That’s an example. KOI-55 b orbits its blue subdwarf star so close that it was swallowed by the former red giant. What’s more, maybe KOI-55b was a gas giant that survived the red giant, leaving only the core.

8. OGLE-2005-BLG-390L b

OGLE-2005-BLG-390L b is the coldest planet ever found. It is a super-Earth, 2 times as wide as Earth. It orbits a red dwarf star once every 9 years and its heat only barely warmed it so it has a surface temperature of -220 degrees celsius. This planet is close to the galactic centre, about 21,500 light years from Earth and it is discovered by gravitational microlensing.

9. HD 209458 b

HD 209458 b is so close to its star that its year only lasts 3.5 Earth days. It’s larger than Jupiter but less massive. It is so hot that its atmosphere got escaped from the planet by its star’s heat, making it a comet-like gas giant. It is the first planet detected by transit, although it was first discovered by radial velocity.

10. Kepler-7 b

Kepler-7 b is a very, very weird planet. It has less than half of Jupiter’s mass but it is about 1.6 Jupiters wide! That giant is so light that it is as light as Styrofoam. It is also a hot Jupiter and it only takes a mere 5 days to orbit the star once! Also, Kepler-7 b is the first exoplanet’s clouds being mapped.

Special: The Strangest Planetary System: The Solar System

Yes. Our Solar System is very strange. First of all, there are no planets inside Mercury’s orbit, although asteroids seldom come in. But we have a lot of exoplanets found inside Mercury’s orbit, sometimes in an orbit close enough that it orbits its star in less than a day! But the object with the shortest period is Mercury and its orbit lasts for 88 days.

Then, there aren’t any hot Jupiters in our Solar System. They are very common thanks to migration. Jupiter migrated inward too but it turns out that Saturn pulled it out.

Also, there aren’t any super-Earths in our Solar System. They are terrestrial planets larger than Earth, which is quite small for a rocky planet. That’s because Jupiter ate the material to form planets and stopped the rocky ones from being bigger. It is good for Earth because a super-Earth probably cannot sustain life because of stronger gravity.

Credit: NASA’s Eyes and exoplanets.nasa.gov