There are many strange things we do not understand about our universe, with black holes, dark
matter and a whole bunch of weird sights and sounds out there that we just can't figure
out.
But what's even more perplexing is when we think we understand, and then we make a discovery
that confuses the heck out of us, especially when that discovery involves an entire planet.
A planet that should not be.
The darkest planet ever seen, a world made of diamond, and a world which may hint at
secrets in our own solar system are just some of the entries in our list of five planets
that shouldn't exist.
Number 5: The Darkest Planet Ever Found TrES-2b is what space scientists call a Hot Jupiter,
and this isn't because they like zit-shaming our local gas giant with its unsightly red
spot.
Also known as Roaster Planets, Hot Jupiters are so called due to their resemblance to
Jupiter and the fact they are extremely close orbit to their parent stars.
And, at a distance of just three million miles away from its parent, TrES-2b orbits at less
than one tenth the distance that Mercury does from our own Sun.
Yet despite being so close, TrES-2b is the darkest planet ever discovered by man, as
when the Kepler mission stumbled across it in 2009 it was found to bounce back less than
1 % of the light that hits it, making it less reflective than coal, black acrylic paint,
and Jaden Smith.
Seriously, does that kid never read back his own tweets?
If you could see TrES-2b up close you'd witness a giant ball of black gas with a slight red
tinge to it, and it was identified due this feint red glow which comes as a result of
its surface temperatures being an incredible 1,100 degrees Celsius; a situation caused
by it being tidally locked to its parent star.
It was also discovered that TrES-2b was part of a binary system, so despite the fact that
this gas giant has two stars to play with and it's only a spitting distance away from
one of them, somehow it still remains the darkest planet we've ever seen.
Unless we've observed a whole bunch more and not noticed of course.
Number 4: The Planet Born Inside A Star Since everything that exists in our universe is
thought to have been created inside a star, you may think this entry sounds a little pointless.
But you won't be saying that when you hear the story of the mysterious Kepler 78-b, a.k.a.
the Hell Planet.
Also discovered using the Kepler space telescope, the Hell Planet has a radius and mass only
slighty bigger than Earth's, and it is also thought to maintain a relatively similar
composition of rock and iron.
At the time of its discovery in 2013 it was the exoplanet most similar to Earth we'd ever
seen, however, if your brain started pondering the prospect of life on this planet let me
stop you right there, as surface temperatures on the Hell Planet may be as high as 2827
degrees Celsius.
As you might have guessed already, this planet has a pretty tight orbit, but much like a
hillbilly father, it's a little too close to its own son than it should be.
Forget TrES-2b's proximity, this fella is 40 times nearer to its sun than Mercury is
to ours, which means technically it shouldn't even exist.
The Hell Planet's parent star Kepler 78 was once much bigger than it is presently, in
fact it was so large that its radius would've been beyond where the Hell Planet exists today.
This discovery screws with our current theories on planetary formation, as there's no way
it could have evolved in its current location, and there's no known process which could've
slung it there either.
But one thing is for certain, and it's that the Hell Planet will be swallowed by its parent
star sometime in the next 3 billion years.
Unless it doesn't do that and instead just turns into a giant space weasel that spurts
out candy cane rocketships, because who the heck even knows anymore?
Number 3: The Diamond Planet If diamonds are a girl's best friend then we'd better start
shipping our ladies off to 55 Cancri e, because this world which is 40 light years away is
comprised of so much diamond that if you mined them all you'd own 26.9 nonillion dollars-worth
of shiny rappers' delight.
That's 26.9 followed by 29 zeroes, and such an abundance of bling is thought to have been
caused by the planet's abundance of carbon and its high mass to size ratio, as despite
being only twice Earth's size it has a mass eight times greater, so it packs a whole lot
more junk into only a slightly bigger trunk.
Also, the diamond planet's extreme temperatures are also thought to be involved, with the
end result being a world whose surface is one third diamond.
So if diamonds aren't rare here, I wonder what its people would use for wedding rings
instead?
Ham?
I hope it's ham.
Scientists have said that this strange world, which we previously thought couldn't exist,
has given us our first view of a planet with a chemical makeup vastly different to our
own.
And with such a unique discovery you'd think they'd give it a super cool name.
But no, because in 2015 they renamed 55 Cancri e as the planet Janssen, which makes it sound
like a world full of Dutch Euro-pop boybands.
Number 2: Wasp 18b reminds me a lot of Hugh Hefner, because not only does it maintain
a close proximity to extremely hot objects, it also should've died a long time ago.
Wasp 18b is another Hot Jupiter which orbits the
Wasp 18 star located in the southern hemisphere's Phoenix constellation, but a planet of this
size located so close to its sun should have been torn apart a long time ago, and scientists
are baffled as to how it's managed to hold out so long.
We believe the planet is probably in its death spiral right now, with a maximum lifespan
of a million years left on the clock, but we're still yet to deduce what strange forces
have helped Wasp 18b live long beyond its years.
Maybe it's been following the Heff's lead all this time - Viagra and beauty queen teens,
heck it works for me.
Number 1: The Far Out Planet Ever since Pluto was cruelly dropped to the bench it's seemed
like we've been one planet short of a solar system, which sounds like a particularly cruel
way of describing Kanye West right now.
But, in recent years there has been hope of a new ninth planet being discovered, with
astronomers proposing the hypothetical existence of a giant world somewhere beyond Neptune.
Such a discovery would explain our solar system's strangely tilted orbits, but many scientists
questioned whether such a large planet could exist so far away from its own star...until
we discovered another planet orbiting a different star at a distance twenty times that of Neptune.
Say hello to Planet HD 106906 b; 11 times the size of Jupiter and which spins around
60 billion miles away from its parent star.
For a start that's some bad parenting right there, but this also makes no sense scientifically,
because an orbit of this magnitude should be way too far out for a planet to form, according
to our existing knowledge.
But as we've seen already on this list, the universe has a habit of kicking our accepted
scientific theories squarely in the nuts now and then, and while we do have some theories
on how Planet HD 106906 b could've been formed, including one that suggests it was created
around a different star as part of a binary system, none of these ideas fully holds up
to scrutiny.
We are continuing to monitor this strange world in the hope that future observations
may explain its origins, and since Planet HD 106906 b is only a sprightly 13 million
years old, compared to Earth's grandpa-like 4.6 billion year age, it is thought that this
planet could teach us new and exciting things about how the ways in which planets are formed,
while also giving us renewed hope that we may have another giant planet of our own in
our solar back yard.