Have you ever looked up into the night's sky and wondered whether those distant flickering
points of light, that we call stars, have planets orbiting them? Every individual star
that you can see with the naked eye is a part of the Milky Way Galaxy and it is estimated
that on average, there is at least one planet per star, meaning that there could be more
than 100 billion alien planets waiting to be discovered. A planet that orbits another
star, is called an exoplanet and In the past two decades alone more than 5000 of these
mysterious worlds have already been identified. They come in a variety of ways, from gargantuan
gas worlds that dwarf even Jupiter to icy hellscapes that exist at the fringes of there
stars gravitational influence. Astronomers have even discovered exoplanets that exist
within the habitable zone of there stars, perhaps making them suitable for life as we
know it. The boundaries of what is possible in the
universe seem to change every year and with the help advancing technology, we are finding
exoplanets that are so extraordinary, that only a decade ago, the existence of these
worlds would have been thought of as impossible. Currently, we have only just scratched the
surface of what is out there, so let's take a look at some strange and unusual exoplanets
that have been discovered so far. 434 light-years away, in the constellation
of Centaurus, is the magnificent, but bizarre, J1407B. This distant gas giant possesses one
of the largest known ring systems in the galaxy, making it kind of like a super Saturn. The
exoplanet is estimated to have a total of 37 rings that span nearly 75 million miles
or 120 million kilometres in diameter, making it more than 200 times larger than Saturn's
rings are today. J1407B was discovered after it passed in front of its parent star, causing
a series of complex brightness variations that blocked 95% of the star's light for 56
days. The detected light curve revealed the planets enormous ring system but also found
that the rings had clear gaps, leading scientists to believe that small exomoons may have formed
within the clearings. Why the planet possesses such a large ring system is unknown, but astronomers
do expect that over a few million years they will become thinner and eventually form new
exomoons, before disappearing forever. 489 light-years away in the constellation
of Monoceros, is Corot 7B, one of the hottest rocky exoplanets ever detected. This blistering
world orbits almost 60 times closer to its star than Earth does to the sun, possibly
causing parts of its surface to be covered with molten lava oceans. Corot 7b is tidally
locked, making its dayside permanently scorched with temperatures reaching 2,000 degrees Celsius,
which is 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit. But on its night's side, the temperature drastically
drops well below freezing, keeping half of the exoplanet permanently frigid. Corot 7B
is estimated to be around 1.5 times the size of earth, but it has been suggested that the
scorched world may have begun its existence as a more distant, larger gas planet, possibly
similar to our solar systems, Saturn. However, Corot 7b's orbit eventually shrunk and as
a result, the exoplanet lost its thick atmosphere, leaving only a dead rocky core.
5600 light-years away, in the constellation of Scorpius, lurks one of the strangest exoplanets
ever discovered, the nicknamed Methuselah. Officially known as PSR B1260-26b, Methuselah
is the oldest known planet in the Milky Way Galaxy, at an estimated 12.7 billion years
old, making it three times the age of Earth. But what's incredible about this age, is that
the planet must have formed just a billion years after the Big Bang. Methuselah is 2.5
times the mass of Jupiter, making it a giant gas and it bizarrely orbits a pair of ancient
stars that are located just outside a huge globular cluster called Messier 4. The host
stars are a part of a magnificent binary system, one is a violently spinning pulsar that is
producing extremely powerful beams of radiation, while the other is the hot remnant core of
an ancient star, which is called a white dwarf and is likely the star that Methuselah originally
formed around. Just 48 light-years away in the constellation of Ophiuchus, is a strange
exoplanet called Gliese 1214b. This world is said to be one of the most likely candidates
for being an ocean planet, giving it the nickname "the water world". Observations suggest that
its density is much lower than Earths, possibly making it a rocky exoplanet that is covered
in a thick mantle of water, which is then shrouded by an atmosphere of hydrogen and
helium. However, Gliese 1214b orbits its red dwarf host star at a distance of only 1.2
million miles, which is 1.9 million kilometres, making it's surface temperature much higher
than Earths and likely forming exotic materials, such as hot ice and hot superfluid water.
This means that Gliese 1214B could be a new type of exoplanet, a hot steamy water world
that is covered by a strange liquid hundreds, possibly even thousands of miles deep.