11 Strangest Alien Planets | Unveiled

11 Strangest Alien Planets

According to the upper estimates, there could be trillions of planets in just our galaxy alone, and perhaps multiple septillion planets in the entire universe. Earth is certainly a unique one, and it’s still the only place we know for sure hosts life. But that doesn’t mean that all those other alien worlds are just desolate wastelands. In fact, some of them are so weird you might not believe they exist at all.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re uncovering the weirdest, strangest and most bizarre alien planets in the cosmos.

Let’s start about 12,400 lightyears away from Earth, in the Scorpius constellation, where you’ll find the exoplanet PSR B1620-26 b. And, prior warning, the planet names don’t get any easier from here on out. But, back to PSR B1620-26 b… its existence was only confirmed in 2003, but it’s one of the oldest planets we’ve ever found. It’s thought to have formed roughly thirteen billion years ago, making it nearly as old as the universe itself – and comfortably older than Earth (which is a mere 4.5 billion years old). Because of its age, the planet has received various, more palatable nicknames like the “Genesis planet” or “Methuselah”, as in Methuselah the oldest figure in the Bible. In terms of its physical makeup, this world is a gas giant two-and-a-half times the size of Jupiter. But it holds another significant record, too, because it’s the first confirmed circumbinary planet, meaning it orbits not one, but two stars. In this case, a white dwarf and a pulsar.

At the other end of the scale, this time around 456 lightyears away, but still in Scorpius… we find the youngest confirmed exoplanet; K2-33b. This one’s been around for just 9.3 million years, and so has appropriately enough been dubbed by astronomers a “newborn” or “baby” planet. But K2-33b also has a lot of competition for the youngest planet title… with the distant world V830 Tauri b leading the charge. It orbits a star which in itself is only one to two million years old. A fledgling entity alongside everything else in the universe!

But there are other ways of ranking planets besides their age. And, while we may think of Earth as having a huge environmental diversity - with deserts, jungles, and ice caps - we actually live in a very narrow temperature range. And some other worlds are far hotter or far colder than we can imagine. The hottest known planet is called KELT-9b, a tidally locked, gas giant sometimes described as an ultra-hot Jupiter. Its discovery was announced in 2016, and its surface temperature is more than 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s so hot that individual atoms are torn apart on the side of the planet that faces its star. KELT-9b gets its extreme heat because it orbits extremely close to its star, at a distance far closer than even Mercury is to our sun. And then, the KELT-9b star is also, itself, scorching hot, being more than fifty percent hotter than our own sun.

Say you somehow visited KELT-9b and then needed to cool off… you could do worse than to travel to OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb. I’ll say it again, planet names do not roll off the tongue! Thankfully, this one has been conveniently nicknamed “Hoth”, after the fictional planet in “Star Wars”. It’s significantly colder than its movie namesake, though… which, while cold, wasn’t so cold that Han and Luke couldn’t survive the outdoors. The surface temperature on the real-life Hoth is estimated to be around minus-370 degrees Fahrenheit, very significantly colder than Antarctica, parts of which reach minus-70 degrees on average. Real world Hoth remains one of the coldest exoplanets we’ve ever discovered… but, despite these temperatures, it’s actually a rocky planet like Earth is. Only, it’s twenty thousand lightyears away from us!

So, that’s the hottest, the coldest, the youngest and the oldest. Now to TrES-2b; an exoplanet unlike anything we could imagine because it just so happens to be the darkest planet we know about. In fact, it’s one of the darkest objects in general in the universe. TrES-2b reflects less than one percent of the light that reaches it, because the gases contained in its atmosphere are so incredibly absorbent of light. But just because it’s a lightless void doesn’t mean it’s cold, as well. It’s actually another hot Jupiter, a gas giant with extremely high surface temperatures. TrES-2b is certainly one of the most enigmatic worlds we’ve come across, and scientists are still trying to understand exactly how it works. But, seeing as it’s only 750 lightyears away, there’s a chance we’ll learn its secrets soon.

Elsewhere, it’s not always the planet itself that’s weird, but the way it behaves instead. Like with ultra-short-period planets, which have incredibly brief orbits. SWEEPS 10 is one such planet that, for a long time had the shortest known orbital period – it went through an entire year every ten hours! Meaning it completed almost two-and-a-half years for every single day here on Earth. It’s thought that the only reason SWEEPS 10 can survive such a close and swift orbit is because its host star is a dim red dwarf, so it’s just not hot enough to burn the planet up.

But SWEEPS 10 was ousted from its speed-orbiting throne in 2011, with the discovery of PSR J1719-1438 b. This exoplanet (about four thousand lightyears away from Earth) orbits its star at a distance of just 385,000 miles – which is less than the radius of our sun! Because of this, it gets through a year every 2.1 hours. What’s weirder still, though, is that it’s also one of the densest planets we’ve discovered so far… and it’s made out of crystallized carbon, meaning it’s essentially a gigantic diamond. That’s right, there’s a massive, planet-size diamond, right now, just floating through space!

If giant gemstones don’t rouse your interest, however, perhaps the seemingly oxymoronic phenomenon of burning ice will. The planet Gliese 436 b is the closest exoplanet to feature today (at just thirty lightyears away), and it’s what is known as a “hot Neptune”. Like the ice giants Neptune and Uranus, Gliese 436 b is awash with frozen water, but still its surface temperature is estimated to be at least six hundred degrees Fahrenheit. So how is it that the ice on this planet doesn’t just melt away? Well, the pressure here is so strong that it pulls all of the water molecules together and literally forces them to solidify regardless of how hot the conditions get. And, voila, burning ice. And, sidenote, this world also has an extremely quick orbital speed, whizzing through a whole year in less than three days.

It’s not just Jupiter and Neptune that have imitators across the cosmos, though. The planet J1407b is a gas giant often dubbed a “Super Saturn”, and for good reason. Discovered in 2007, it has a vast ring system more than two hundred times larger than Saturn’s own, with more than thirty distinct layers to it. Saturn’s ring system, by comparison, has just seven main layers. The total mass of just the rings around J1407b is thought to be roughly the same as the total mass of Earth as a whole. And it’s predicted that, one day, all of the material inside these rings could coalesce to form many moons. This planet exists 434 lightyears away from us, but astronomers watch it with curiosity… because its incredible rings could one day form an all-new planetary system from scratch.

But, finally, perhaps the strangest planet of all is one that’s much closer to home in terms of its physical makeup. Kepler-438b is considered by many as the most Earth-like exoplanet we’ve ever found. And, when the conditions for life are so seemingly rare and specific, the fact that it could so closely mimic our world is also what qualifies it as weird and unusual. Kepler-438b is just 472 lightyears away from us, and it’s only 200 million years younger than Earth is. The major drawback is that it’s also tidally locked to its parent star, a red dwarf… and we don’t yet know how habitable exoplanets in red dwarf systems truly are. Nevertheless, since it was discovered in 2015, this planet has had the undivided attention of the scientific community.

When you stop and think about it, space really is amazing, isn’t it! And those are the eleven strangest alien planets.