1. The Diamond Planet

1. The Diamond Planet

Discovered in 2004, 55 Cancri e, at twice the Earth’s size and eight times its mass, is called “Super Earth”. Aside from graphite and other silicates, its main component is diamond. It is made of crystallized diamond, with 1/3rd of its mass being pure diamond. Once a star in a binary system, its partner started eat at it, leaving only the gem core. Its temperature is 3900°F. Its Earth value is $26.9 nonillion, 384 quintillion times Earth’s GDP of $74 trillion. Mining only 0.182% of it would pay off the total debt of $50 trillion of all the governments in the world. They just have to travel 40 light years.

There are almost 2000 exoplanets in the universe that have so far been discovered. The remarkable features of many of these strange and mysterious planets outside the solar system often leave the world of science absolutely confounded, when fact about the universe and it hidden planets sound stranger than fiction.

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2. The Planet of Burning Ice

2. The Planet of Burning Ice

Gliese 436 b is another murderous planet under the Gliese catalogue. It about 20 times bigger that Earth, and is roughly the size of Neptune. The planet is 4.3 million miles away from its host star, in comparison to Earth which is 93 million miles from Sun. The temperature on the planet is 822°F, and its surface is covered with burning ice. The immense gravitational force of the planet keeps the water molecules too densely packed to evaporate, and thus, prevents them from escaping the planet. The burning ice is called ice-ten, with reference to ice-ten from Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.

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3. The Planet with Enormous Planetary Rings

3. The Planet with Enormous Planetary Rings

J1407 b has been discovered in 2012, and its data have been compiled and submitted for publication only recently. It is located 400 light years away from Earth. What is astounding about this planet is that it has a system of planetary rings, just like Saturn, and these rings are 200 times larger than the ones around Saturn. The rings are so big that if they belonged to Saturn, it would almost dominate the Earth’s sky, appearing larger than the Moon, and scientists also observed a 56-day eclipse of its host star. The gaps between the rings are believed to represent exomoons orbiting this exoplanet.

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4. The Swelled Up Gas Planet

4. The Swelled Up Gas Planet

HAT-P-1 is a strange and mysterious planet outside the solar system, located 450 light years away, and has recently been discovered by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Is a giant gas planet with a size about half of Jupiter, but the stunning fact about the planet is that, despite its size, it weighs about the same as only a cork ball. It is classified as a “hot Jupiter” planet, it is almost 25% bigger than models estimate, which confuses the astrophysicists, who are trying to find out why it is swelled up. Scientists suspect that it can float in water, and are curious to test how well it can do so.

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5. The Loneliest Planet

5. The Loneliest Planet

HD 106906 b is the “forever-alone guy” of planets as it hangs out, all by itself, in the Cruz constellation, revolving around its host star at a distance 60,000,000,000 miles, over 20 times the space between Neptune and the Sun. Located nearly 300 light years away from the Earth, the “Super-Jupiter” class planet which is above 11 times larger than the Jupiter, is thus too far away from the host to gather raw material needed for its formation. Astrophysicists hypothecate that it is a failed star, thus challenging the binary star theory, since it is too small for binary formations.

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6. The Black Hole Planet

6. The Black Hole Planet

TrES-2b is a lot like Jupiter: they are both nearly the same size, and it orbits a star that is similar to the sun – except, it is some 750 light years away. This Jupiter-class gas giant reflects less than 1 percent of the light which strikes. In other words, it absorbs huge amount of light, so much so that it is considered the darkest planet. It is darker that black acrylic paint or even coal. It is speculated that the atmosphere of the planet has chemicals, or mix of compounds. Interestingly, at 1800°F, it turns hot enough to emit a dull, reddish glow, which is visible probably because of all the absorbed light.

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7. The Planet from Hell

7. The Planet from Hell

Gliese 581c is theoretically the most likely to support colonization, except it is one hell of a planet. It is tidally locked to always face the Red Dwarf star which it revolves around, on one side, and is at a distance such that standing on the star-side of the planet will melt you, while stepping on the dark-side will freeze you immediately. In the narrow habitable belt between the two extremes, there are other challenges. The sky is hellishly red since the planet is at the lower frequency end of our visual spectrum, while photosynthesizing plants are subjected to infrared radiation, thus blackening them.

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