The Most Unusual Planets in the Universe

t-r-e-s-2b is a planet where night never ends and it's not your regular Knight with stars shining in the beautiful Skies here it's pitch dark and scorching High Tres 2B is a gas giant roughly one and a half times more massive than Jupiter and its surface absorbs light better than charcoal it might also have a faint dark red glow because of its burning air which is as hot as fresh lava lovely in the star system of 55 cancri there are five planets four of which are gas giants similar to Jupiter and Saturn but the fifth one or rather the first because it's closest to the star is different in a most horrible way 55 cancri e is so close to its Sun that half the planet's surface is a literal ocean of molten lava the other half is an eternal Darkness because it never sees the sun the planet is always turned to its star on one side and between the scorching and the dark there's the Twilight Zone a thin strip of gloomy nothingness hd189377 B well I'm not going to say that again is the only exoplanet in the orbit of its star and at first glance it looks quite pretty blue and white swirls making up wondrous patterns on the surface but these Pleasant colors actually come from hard silicate particles in the planet's atmosphere which means it rains glass here but the worst is that winds reached the speed of 5400 miles per hour or almost Mach 7. well for comparison the fastest wind speed on Earth was 254 miles per hour over 20 times less thus the glass falling from the sky travels horizontally at Hypersonic speeds shredding everything in its path the next system whose name I won't even try to pronounce um this one has three exoplanets which are all being slowly destroyed by their own star it happens because that star is not a regular it's a pulsar a rapidly spinning core of an exploded star it creates powerful electromagnetic pulses in several directions while rotating at several thousand times per second as a result the planets orbiting this deceased star are slowly being eaten away and will eventually disappear entirely kepler-70 is a hot blue dwarf star that exploded into a red giant some 18 million years ago at the time it was orbited by at least two planets the closer of which was a jupiter-like gas giant its name was kepler-70b and it still exists but the overgrown star consumed it and transformed it into a blazing hot Rocky world right now it's one of the hottest planets ever discovered its temperature is higher than the surface of our sun it was lucky to survive spending time inside the star but it's evaporating now and will probably be no more in the near future wasp 12b is one of the weirdest and saddest planets out there the enormous gravity of its star combined with the planets consisting mostly of gas result in the star slowly devouring its protege wasp 12b has already taken the form of an egg stretched toward its merciless sun and it's unable to do anything with its condition in another 10 million years the planet will inevitably succumb to the voracious star's appetite if you ever wondered what it's like to walk on ice and hot coals at the same time lesi 436b is a planet that would give you a vivid example being extremely close to its Sun the Neptune size exoplanet boasts temperatures hotter than a blazing oven and yet it's covered in ice which burns incessantly this ice is much denser due to the enormous gravity of the planet staying solid even under extreme conditions and not melting away no list of frightening worlds could do without mentioning Venus the Earth's evil twin the second planet from the sun has an atmosphere so thick and full of clouds that its surface is much hotter than that of mercury volcanic eruptions constantly thrash Venus its gravity is almost a hundred times stronger than ours and those clouds I mentioned are not made of water but of sulfuric acid which condenses and rains down on the ground adding to The Inferno but even if you were Brave or crazy enough to try to pass through these clouds you probably couldn't the winds up there are as strong as some of the most powerful hurricanes back on Earth here we have a very long name for a very very cold Planet although the host star is not too far away it's a small and rather cool Red Dwarf whose light in heat barely even reached the planet the temperatures out there fall as low as minus 370 degrees which is only marginally warmer than absolute zero the exoplanet is thus dark gloomy and covered in Eternal eyes that never thaws still if it has a rocky core it might generate some heat so there's a chance that deep below the Frozen surface some unknown alien things might lurk dimidium located roughly 50 light years away from our solar system is a planet hostile to any living thing on many accounts it's tidally locked to its sun which means one of its sides is always facing the star while the other is always turned away the hot side is heated to over 1800 degrees perpetually blown over with winds reaching 600 miles per hour despite dimidium being a gas giant it has a large amount of iron in it which melts and evaporates in the atmosphere creating clouds and when those cool down they fall on the surface in the infernal rain of molten iron oxygen is usually viewed as an element that might bring life to a planet but this is definitely not the case for Osiris scientists were shocked to find oxygen on this planet or rather around it because it's eight times closer to its star than Mercury is to the sun this extreme distance makes Osiris a living Melting Pot where anything that could burn will it's also responsible for a very short orbit of the planet around the star a year on Osiris is just three and a half days on Earth to boot the atmosphere of the planet is constantly blown and melted away by the heat from its Sun karate xo3b is neither is hot nor as cold as some of the others on this list but it's terrifying in its own more Insidious way it's a gas giant similar in size to Jupiter yet 20 times denser this makes this exoplanet's gravity weigh down on everything on its surface 50 times more than it would on Earth stepping on it would be your ultimate Doom because you'd be immediately crushed by the density of its atmosphere karate 7B is another oven-like world its day-to-day temperature is over 4000 degrees combined with the rocky surface it presents an infernal landscape the rocks on the ground bubble and boil evaporating in the atmosphere where they cool down and eventually fall back on the surface in a brimstone rain the saddest thing about karate 7B is that it might have once been a gas giant whose atmosphere melted away from the heat leaving only the scorched core we're used to thinking that asteroids are the only free-floating rocks in space but things like ots-44 make you think twice and shiver imagine a planet about 11 times more massive than Jupiter Roaming In Space without being bound to the orbit of any Star given its gargantuan size and mass if ots-44 collides with any other planet it would utterly destroy it and go on floating as if nothing happened scarier still scientists are sure there are millions of such rogue planets out there just waiting to be discovered there's no hard proof of their existence yet but theoretically carbon planets have formed somewhere closer to the center of our galaxy any Oxygen getting in their atmosphere will get into a reaction with carbon and transform into CO2 forming black toxic clouds on the ground there would be oceans made of tar spewing up geysers of methane and crude oil there would be rains too but they'd be far from refreshing torrents of pure gasoline and hot liquid asphalt would blast the ground and probably burst into flames on impact hard to imagine anything that would survive such conditions okay here you are in the middle of the ocean it's endless but you can't see it because there's a thick fog all around you dense clouds hide the huge but dim sun is it day or night you don't know there's only a gray haze around you you're alone even if you try to swim down after several hours you still won't be able to see the bottom of the ocean and that's a typical water planet for you I know sounded kind of dark but it's not that bad these water worlds are more interesting than they may seem so let's take a look at them the ocean planet is a planet that consists as you might have guessed mainly of water ice and maybe some rocks think of the Earth's oceans it's horrifying depths the Mariana Trench and all that and now can you guess how much space all the water on Earth takes up 0. 025 percent exactly now just try to imagine a world a 40 to 60 percent water if you dive in there the depth can exceed 60 miles compared to that the Six Mile depth of our Mariana Trench sounds like nothing and yeah the pressure there will be enormous it can reach up to 20 000 Earth atmospheres very crushing now it may sound scary but it still would be great to find out more about these planets fortunately according to scientist calculations there may be a lot of such planets in our galaxy alone well you don't have to go far you can find these water guys even in our solar system not planets of course but moons Jupiter has Ganymede and Callisto and Saturn has Titan and Enceladus the ocean can reach up to 30 percent of the mass of these moons although it isn't clear whether these oceans are covered with a thick crust of eyes but we've discovered quite a few full-fledged ocean planets this is because the conditions in which these planets may exist are very specific for example this planet should be somewhere six to eight times larger than the earth if it's smaller it'll have a rocky surface but if it's bigger it'll turn into a gas giant at the same time it must be in the habitable zone of its star a little further and the planet immediately turns into an icy giant or a cold super Earth so yeah these guys are very picky we first started exploring these planets back in the 1970s however since then we found only a couple of them but they're still very interesting the first planet is galise 1214b it was the very first ocean planet that we discovered initially the scientists noticed only a small dim dot this dot turned out to be the red dwarf star glease 1214 an unremarkable completely ordinary star that's five times smaller than our sun and 300 times dimmer scientists wouldn't worry about it at all but back in 2009 they noticed that this star had one single planet and this planet turned out to be quite strange this super Earth was two and a half times bigger than our Earth and six and a half times heavier but at the same time it had a very very small density and about the same gravity as our planet in other words there were almost no rocks and metals on it but it wasn't a gas giant either so there was only one option left it was covered in water and ice and that's how we discovered the first ocean planet well actually we can only assume that it consists of water that's what the mathematical calculations say in reality this planet is quite confusing it's difficult to explore and so far scientists haven't been able to find anything there no hydrogen no helium no water NADA that's because the outer layer of the atmosphere of this planet is very dense and it perfectly High its composition but even so it's probably a water world galise 1214b is very close to its star it's only 0.

014 astronomical units away which is less than the distance between the Moon and us the year there lasts about 36 hours and the temperatures to put it mildly are just wild scientists suggest that the average temperature there can reach 250 to 535 degrees Fahrenheit that's hot remember the creepy description from the beginning well actually spending time on Khaleesi 1214b would be a little different more like swimming in a steam boiler because of such gigantic temperatures the ocean on the surface will be constantly in the state close to Boiling without actually reaching it so imagine that you're descending to the surface of this planet flying through clouds of steam and then you suddenly find yourself in the water what but when did it happen well that's because the boundary between Steam and water on gliese 1214b will be very blurred of course you won't be able to swim to the bottom of this ocean but most likely this bottom is covered with a very thick layer of so-called hot eyes it's like regular eyes but it doesn't really care about the laws of physics so it just doesn't melt even at gigantic temperatures and the thickness of this ice can reach as much as 3 000 miles so that's it for for the creepy gliesy 1214b and not an Airbnb in sight now although we can't 100 guarantee that it's a water world we still have another candidate for this position a newly discovered planet called toi 1452b this planet located in the dragon constellation is almost 100 light years away from us it was discovered using the test telescope by a group of researchers from the University of Montreal this planet also belongs to the class of super Earths it's seven times larger than our planet but 48 times heavier again all this is at a very low density because of this scientists have suggested that almost the entire planet consists of a giant ocean here we were a little luckier this world won't be just a giant puddle and some thick eyes on this planet there's probably a rocky surface deep under the water just like in a typical ocean don't get too excited though this this ocean will certainly be very different from what we're used to I 1452b also orbits a small red dwarf and not even one but two at once at the same time if the previous planet was close to its Sun then this one on the contrary is very very far away it's two and a half times farther from its Stars than Pluto is from the sun and it moves at great speed a year there lasts only 11 days but we still don't know many things about this planet we'll probably get some new information when scientists observe it from the James Webb Telescope well that's it wait did you expect something else all right all right I know the question that bothers you the most can there be life well this is a difficult question we all know that water means life and besides these planets are in the habitable zones of Their Stars so potentially yes there might be life not some full-fledged civilizations of course but bacteria fish and some creepy giant monsters I mean you know why not however this is very unlikely water alone isn't enough to create life even though it's very important there should also be some micro elements and some minerals and unfortunately for most water planets the composition will only consist of water and very thick eyes there won't be any minerals there but don't give up there's still some probability first of all there are meteorites and comets they can bring the necessary minerals to the planet the more often they crash into it the higher the probability that they'll bring something like this into the ocean and thus create life secondly toi 1452b actually has these minerals yes we don't know how deep the rocky bottom is located there but if it exists then surely something could have originated there let's hope that new research with powerful telescopes will allow us to find out the truth and who knows maybe one day we'll be able to visit such a planet ourselves the only life that we are certain about so far in the entire universe is on planet Earth whether that life is intelligent is let's say arguable but anyway it's not surprising that we're tirelessly searching for life on other planets so far they've discovered more than 4 000 of them but what's even cooler NASA has compiled a new list of 24 planets that aren't just Earth-like they're better the conditions on them are so good that they're more comfortable than on our planet so let's examine some of them koi 5715. 01 let's be coy shall we this wonderful planet is in the constellation cygnus and why is it so wonderful well our sun is a yellow dwarf and sorry son even though you're not bad at supporting life there are some stars that can do it better nothing personal the planet koi 5715. 01 orbits near an orange dwarf orange dwarfs are stars slightly smaller than our sun and have a little lower Luminosity uh did you like the alliteration there anyway don't worry it doesn't mean we're going to live in complete darkness in fact if the planet is found closer to the sun and it has a thicker atmosphere it may even be lighter and more colorful than on Earth now our son has a very short lifespan right now it has seven to eight billion years left to live a little longer than Earth's age but orange dwarfs can live from 45 to 70 billion years this is great not only because we'll be able to hang out on this planet longer but also because the planets around these stars have more time to form life now ideally we would need to find a planet next to an orange dwarf that is about 7 billion years old it's very likely there will be at least some organisms there koi 571501 is about 5.

5 billion years old yeah it may not seem mature enough but that's okay neither do I our Earth is a billion years younger and that didn't stop us the planet is quite close to its star and is in a habitable zone when you're there last 190 days imagine going to elementary school and already getting a driver's license it's almost two times larger than the earth the average temperature there is 52 degrees Fahrenheit which is slightly less than ours 57 but it mostly feels warmer there because strong gravity helps it hold on to heat in the atmosphere longer it's a little too far away though like 3 000 light years from Earth which is about 18 quadrillion miles yep better bring a really big lunch with you koi 3010.