The 5 Most Insane Planets In The Universe

Throughout the Universe, there are two trillion  galaxies. We live in one, The Milky Way. Each of these galaxies are filled with hundreds of  billions of stars, each with their own planets just like ours.

These numbers are crazy and big  and don't mean much to us humans. But all you need to know is there are practically infinite planets.  This means the craziest planets you can dream up probably exist somewhere out there and today I  want to show you the five craziest planets we've discovered so far.

So buckle in because these  planets are beautiful, mind-blowing, and perhaps even a little bit scary. But most importantly they  are real. These are real places in the universe.

Welcome to Kepler 16b, the planet with  two suns. Now this planet has earned the nickname Tatooine in real life because of  its astounding similarity to the Star Wars Planet Tatooine. Kepler-16b is around the  same size as Saturn and is just 245 light years away from us.

This was the first planet  ever discovered in a circumbinary orbit which is just a fancy way of saying this planet  actually orbits two suns. This means that if you were to go outside on the planet you  would see two stars moving across the sky during the day. I mean can you imagine what  a double sunset would look like?

Now while it would be awesome if we could live there, this  planet actually orbits outside of the habitable zone meaning it would be too cold for liquid  water to exist on the surface. Sorry Luke. .

. This next planet is so terrifying that it has been  given the nickname, The Planet Of Terror. To the untrained eye this planet looks inviting it's a  nice bright blue color and looks relatively calm but any space traveler who confused it for the  friendly Skies of Earth would be badly mistaken.

The weather on this planet is deadly. I'm  talking 5,400 mile per hour winds. That is seven times the speed of sound.

. . This would  throw any visiting spacecraft off course and cause them certain doom.

Do you want to know  something even worse? The wind wouldn't just blow you around aggressively, it would cause  death by a thousand cuts, literally. .

. The planet rains 500 degree glass. Imagine clouds of  glass shards flying towards you at 5,400 miles per hour.

I don't know about you but I'll be  skipping on the trip to the planet of Terror. . .

Up next we have the planet that most astronomers  refer to as Super-Saturn. This outrageous planet has rings 640x the size of Saturn's rings. It is  just 400 light years away from Earth and defies expectations for what we previously thought was  possible.

Well if the Rings are 640x the size of Saturn's rings, let's imagine what it might look  like if we replaced Saturn with Super-Saturn in our solar system. It would look a little something  like this. The rings would be so bright that they're easily visible at night and they would  be significantly larger than the full moon.

. . This planet is looking a bit more familiar. 

Kepler-186f is often called Earth's cousin because of its striking similarities to Earth.  The planet is around 500 light years from Earth and is only about 10 percent larger. Perhaps even  more exciting is that the planet orbits within the habitable zone around its star.

Meaning in theory,  life could exist on the planet. But here's where things start to get weird. .

. The star that the  planet orbits is much cooler and much redder than our sun and this means that the majority  of the photons hitting the planet are within the red wavelengths of light. Now because of this, the  photosynthesis in plants on this planet could have evolved drastically different to those on Earth,  changing the plants from a green color like you might see on Earth to a striking red color.

Just  imagine forests of bright red trees, the lettuce in your burger a bright red color. In fact this  idea was so interesting to NASA that they created a poster that reads, "Kepler 186f where the  grass is always redder on the other side". Not every planet has a star.

Some  aren't a part of a solar system like us. They're all alone and they're known as rogue  planets. These planets don't orbit, they simply drift along through the cold, dark depths of space  all alone.

On this planet, it likely rains but these rains are not made of water. Instead they  are bands of molten iron. We still don't fully understand how these planets come to exist but  our best theories are that they are either failed stars or planets that have been ejected from baby  systems right after smashing into another planet.

As they drift into the darkness, their molten  cores begin to cool eventually leaving them cold, dark and alone drifting through space. If  one were to drift into our solar system, it could collide with the planet causing mass  destruction. Or it could even gravitationally pull on planets causing them to be thrown  out of the solar system.

The chances are of course low but if one was headed for  us, I'm not sure there's much we could do. These planets are just as real as Earth and in  some cases there is a very real possibility that life could exist on them. I mean we are just a  collective of relatively smart primates that live on a small blue world drifting through a seemingly  silent universe.

For as long as we've existed, we've looked to the stars and dreamed about what  might be out there. Now I believe in aliens and I believe they're out there somewhere but for  now it's just us and maybe that's enough. .

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