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Strange Planets in the Universe: 14 Exoplanets That Defy Imagination
Fourteen of the strangest exoplanets astronomers have found — a planet hotter than most stars, a world darker than coal, a planet with two suns, planets…
In this guide
At a glance
Every planet in this list was chosen because its strangeness is documented, not imagined: each entry rests on published measurements from missions and observatories such as NASA's Kepler, Hubble, Spitzer and James Webb telescopes, ESA's CoRoT, and major ground-based surveys. Distances, temperatures and orbital periods are given as the sources state them, hedged where the science is unsettled — the mass of GJ 504 b, for example, depends on its system's age, and the possible biosignature gas reported around K2-18b is explicitly flagged as contested. One honesty note on the pictures: no telescope can photograph the surface of a planet light-years away, so every image in this article is an artist's impression produced by NASA, ESA, ESO or the discovery teams, credited and licensed in the pack's sources file. They show what astronomers believe these worlds look like based on the data — nothing more, and nothing less.
- KELT-9b — The planet hotter than some stars
- WASP-12b — The doomed planet being pulled apart by its star
- HD 189733 b — The blue planet where glass rains sideways
- 55 Cancri e (Janssen) — The super-Earth once called the diamond planet
Shortlist and comparison
| Topic | Best for | What to verify |
|---|---|---|
| KELT-9b | The planet hotter than some stars | Dayside temperature near 4,600 K |
| WASP-12b | The doomed planet being pulled apart by its star | Orbit decaying — about 2.9 million years left |
| HD 189733 b | The blue planet where glass rains sideways | Winds around 7,000 km/h carrying silicate rain |
| 55 Cancri e (Janssen) | The super-Earth once called the diamond planet | A year lasts just 17.7 hours |
| TrES-2b (Kepler-1b) | The darkest planet ever measured | Reflects less than 1 per cent of the light hitting it |
| GJ 1214 b (Enaiposha) | The 'water world' whose story keeps changing | Density suggests a world rich in water or gas |
| Kepler-16b | The real Tatooine, with two suns in its sky | Orbits two stars at once — a circumbinary planet |
| Proxima Centauri b | The nearest alien world, in our star's backyard | Closest known exoplanet — about 4.2 light-years away |
| CoRoT-7b | The first rocky planet — with a possible lava ocean | A year of just 20.5 hours |
| K2-18b | The ocean-world candidate at the centre of a life debate | Possible dimethyl sulphide signal — claimed, contested, unproven |
| Gliese 436 b (Awohali) | The Neptune trailing a giant comet-like tail | Losing up to about 1,000 tonnes of hydrogen a second |
| GJ 504 b | The pink planet that telescopes actually photographed | One of the few exoplanets ever directly imaged |
| PSR B1257+12 (Lich) system | The first exoplanets ever found — orbiting a dead star | Includes the lowest-mass planet known, Draugr |
| HD 209458 b (Osiris) | The planet evaporating into space | First transiting exoplanet, first measured atmosphere |
The brands in detail
1. KELT-9b
KELT-9b is an ultra-hot Jupiter orbiting the star KELT-9 (also catalogued as HD 195689), about 670 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. Its discovery was announced in 2016 after the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) survey caught it transiting its host star. With a dayside temperature of about 4,579 K — roughly 4,600 K — it is the hottest exoplanet known, hotter than the surfaces of many small stars. The heat is no mystery: KELT-9b races around its star in just 1.48 days, on an unusual polar orbit, and the star itself burns at about 10,170 K, far hotter than the Sun. The planet is nearly three times as massive as Jupiter. Observations with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope showed that on the dayside it is hot enough to tear hydrogen molecules apart; the fragments drift to the cooler nightside and recombine, carrying heat with them in a cycle with no equivalent among cooler planets.
Featured model: Ultra-hot Jupiter · about 670 light-years away · Cygnus
2. WASP-12b
WASP-12b, about 1,350 light-years away in Auriga, is a hot Jupiter that is quite literally coming apart. Discovered in April 2008 by the SuperWASP transit survey, it orbits its star in just 1.09 days at a distance of only 0.0234 AU, closer than any planet in our solar system relative to its sun. The star's gravity stretches the planet — roughly 1.47 times Jupiter's mass, according to NASA — into a slightly egg-like shape and is stripping its atmosphere away. Hubble observations found the atmosphere unusually rich in carbon. Most remarkably, astronomers have measured the orbit itself shrinking: the period shortens by about 29 milliseconds every year as tides drag the planet inwards. Studies put its remaining lifetime at roughly 2.9 million years, after which it will spiral into its star and be destroyed — a fate astronomers can watch unfolding in slow motion.
Featured model: Hot Jupiter · about 1,350 light-years away · Auriga
3. HD 189733 b
From a distance, HD 189733 b looks deceptively Earth-like: in 2013 the Hubble Space Telescope measured its true colour and found a deep azure blue — the first time any exoplanet's colour had been determined. The resemblance ends there. This hot Jupiter, 64.5 light-years away in Vulpecula and discovered by a French team in 2005, is about 11 per cent larger and heavier than Jupiter and whips around its star every 2.2 days. Its atmosphere exceeds 1,000 °C, and its blue tint comes not from oceans but from silicate particles high in its hazy atmosphere scattering blue light. Those silicates are thought to condense into droplets of molten glass that rain sideways through winds of around 7,000 km/h, as reported by NASA. It is the closest transiting hot Jupiter to Earth, which is why it has been studied so intensely — it was also the first exoplanet to have a temperature map made.
Featured model: Hot Jupiter · about 64.5 light-years away · Vulpecula
4. 55 Cancri e (Janssen)
55 Cancri e, formally named Janssen, was announced in 2004 and holds a place in history as the first super-Earth discovered around a main-sequence star, found by watching its star's radial-velocity wobble. About 41 light-years away in Cancer, it packs roughly eight Earth masses into a world about 1.9 times Earth's radius, and it orbits its Sun-like star in just 17.7 hours — a year shorter than a single Earth day. Its dayside is hot enough to melt rock, with temperature estimates in the thousands of kelvin. In 2012 researchers proposed it might be a carbon planet with an interior rich in diamond, a claim that made headlines worldwide. The story has kept evolving: observations with the James Webb Space Telescope published in 2024 indicated a genuine volatile atmosphere, probably rich in carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide, rather than a bare lava surface — a reminder that even the best-studied rocky planets can still surprise us.
Featured model: Super-Earth · about 41 light-years away · Cancer
5. TrES-2b (Kepler-1b)
TrES-2b is the darkest known exoplanet. It orbits a Sun-like star about 750 light-years away in Draco and was discovered on 21 August 2006 by the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey (TrES), using small 10 cm telescopes. It is a hot Jupiter, slightly larger than Jupiter, circling its star every 2.47 days. Its fame comes from measurements by NASA's Kepler spacecraft in 2011, which found that the planet reflects less than 1 per cent of the light that strikes it — a best-fit reflectivity of about 0.04 per cent — making it darker than coal or black acrylic paint. Astronomers think light-absorbing vapours such as sodium, potassium and gaseous titanium oxide in its atmosphere soak up the light instead of clouds reflecting it. The planet is no cold shadow, though: heated to around 1,000 °C, it is expected to glow faintly, like embers, with a dull red light of its own.
Featured model: Hot Jupiter · about 750 light-years away · Draco
6. GJ 1214 b (Enaiposha)
GJ 1214 b, officially named Enaiposha, orbits a red dwarf about 48 light-years away in Ophiuchus. It was discovered in December 2009 by the MEarth Project, which used modest ground-based telescopes to watch nearby red dwarfs for transits. The planet is about 2.7 times Earth's diameter and roughly 8.4 times its mass, orbiting its star every 38 hours at a distance of only about 2 million kilometres, with an estimated temperature near 230 °C. Its low density — about 2 grams per cubic centimetre, far below Earth's 5.5 — demands large amounts of light material. Hubble observations in 2012 made it famous as a candidate 'water world', a planet where a huge fraction of the mass is water beneath a thick, steamy atmosphere. More recent modelling informed by the James Webb Space Telescope suggests a water-dominated interior is implausible and that a thick gaseous envelope is more likely. Few planets show so clearly how interpretations change as instruments improve.
Featured model: Sub-Neptune · about 48 light-years away · Ophiuchus
7. Kepler-16b
Kepler-16b made science fiction real. Announced on 15 September 2011 from data gathered by NASA's Kepler spacecraft, it was the first confirmed circumbinary planet — a world orbiting not one star but two. About 200 light-years away in Cygnus, its two suns circle each other every 41 days: a K dwarf with about 69 per cent of the Sun's mass and a red dwarf with only about 20 per cent. The planet, about the size and mass of Saturn, takes 229 days to orbit both stars at a distance of 0.705 AU. Because both suns are small and cool, Kepler-16b is a cold world, with temperatures estimated between about −73 °C and −101 °C, despite sitting at roughly Venus's distance from its stars. A visitor standing on a moon of this gas giant would see two shadows and, in the evening, a double sunset — exactly the scene Star Wars imagined for Tatooine decades earlier.
Featured model: Circumbinary gas giant · about 200 light-years away · Cygnus
8. Proxima Centauri b
Every other planet in this list is far away; Proxima Centauri b is practically next door. It orbits Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, just 4.2 light-years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus. Its discovery was announced on 24 August 2016 by a team led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé, using the HARPS spectrograph at the European Southern Observatory to detect the star's tiny radial-velocity wobble during the 'Pale Red Dot' campaign. The planet has a minimum mass of roughly 1.1 Earth masses and completes an orbit in just 11.2 days, only 0.0485 AU from its star. Because Proxima is a dim red dwarf, that tight orbit still places the planet inside the habitable zone, where temperatures could allow liquid water. Whether it can keep an atmosphere is another matter: Proxima is an active flare star, and its planet is exposed to intense stellar wind and radiation. It remains the closest known exoplanet and the most tantalising target for future probes.
Featured model: Rocky exoplanet · about 4.2 light-years away · Centaurus
9. CoRoT-7b
CoRoT-7b was a landmark: reported in February 2009 by the French-led CoRoT space mission, it was the first potential rocky (terrestrial) exoplanet found, and until Kepler-10b came along in 2011 it was the smallest exoplanet with a measured diameter. It lies about 520 light-years away in Monoceros. Its density is similar to Earth's and its radius about 1.6 times Earth's, with a mass of roughly six Earth masses, though the mass is still uncertain. What makes it strange is its orbit: it circles its star in just 20.5 hours — the shortest year of any planet known at the time — at only 0.0172 AU. The dayside, at 1,300 to 1,800 K, may be covered by an ocean of lava, while the nightside of this probably tidally locked world could be frozen. Tidal flexing may also drive volcanic activity reminiscent of Jupiter's moon Io. One hemisphere of molten rock, one of darkness: few worlds are so sharply divided.
Featured model: Rocky super-Earth · about 520 light-years away · Monoceros
10. K2-18b
No exoplanet has generated more headlines — or more argument — than K2-18b. Discovered in 2015 by NASA's Kepler spacecraft during its K2 mission, it is a sub-Neptune of about 8.6 Earth masses and 2.6 Earth radii, orbiting a cool red dwarf 124 light-years away in Leo every 32.9 days, squarely inside the star's habitable zone. In 2019 Hubble detected water vapour in its atmosphere. In 2023 the James Webb Space Telescope found methane and carbon dioxide, a combination consistent with a 'Hycean' world: a deep water ocean beneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere. The same team later reported a possible signal of dimethyl sulphide, a gas produced on Earth almost only by marine life. That claim is genuinely contested: independent reanalyses have found the signal not statistically robust, and the discovery team itself describes the evidence as being at the lower end of robustness. K2-18b may yet prove to be an ocean world; for now it is the best case study in how hard it is to read the air of a planet 124 light-years away.
Featured model: Sub-Neptune · about 124 light-years away · Leo
11. Gliese 436 b (Awohali)
Gliese 436 b, formally named Awohali, looks like a planet wearing a comet's tail. It is a Neptune-sized world — about 21 Earth masses and 4.1 Earth radii — orbiting a red dwarf just 33 light-years away in Leo. Discovered in August 2004 by R. Paul Butler and Geoffrey Marcy using the radial velocity method, it circles its star in only 2.64 days at a distance of about 4 million kilometres. In 2015, Hubble observations reported in Nature revealed an enormous cloud of hydrogen escaping from the planet and trailing behind it — a comet-like structure some 50 times the size of the parent star. Radiation from the star is burning off the upper atmosphere at a rate estimated at hundreds of tonnes of hydrogen per second, and the planet may have lost up to 10 per cent of its atmosphere over its lifetime. Its IAU name, Awohali, is a Cherokee word for eagle: in the naming citation, the planet's sun-kissed tail recalls an eagle feather kissed by the Sun.
Featured model: Warm Neptune · about 33 light-years away · Leo
12. GJ 504 b
Almost every exoplanet is detected indirectly, but GJ 504 b was actually seen. Announced in 2013, it was directly imaged by the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii as part of the SEEDS survey, orbiting a Sun-like star 57 light-years away in Virgo. Still glowing with heat left over from its formation, it would appear — in NASA's memorable description — the colour of a dark cherry blossom, a dull magenta. At the time it was the lowest-mass planet ever directly imaged around a star like the Sun, estimated at about four times Jupiter's mass; later estimates of the system's age have pushed the inferred mass higher, which is why astronomers often call it a planetary-mass companion. It orbits at a projected distance of 43.5 AU — nearly nine times farther from its star than Jupiter is from the Sun — a wide orbit that challenges theories of how giant planets form. Its effective temperature is only about 237 °C, and in 2026 the James Webb Space Telescope obtained its first spectrum, with the best-fitting models invoking clouds of salt.
Featured model: Gas giant · about 57 light-years away · Virgo
13. PSR B1257+12 (Lich) system
The first exoplanets ever confirmed were found somewhere nobody expected: orbiting a corpse. PSR B1257+12, nicknamed Lich, is a millisecond pulsar about 2,300 light-years away in Virgo — the spinning remnant of an exploded star, flashing every 6.2 milliseconds. In 1992 Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail announced two planets around it, detected because the planets' gravity made the pulsar's metronome-like radio pulses arrive fractionally early or late. A third planet followed in 1994. The trio are now named Draugr, Poltergeist and Phobetor — an undead theme chosen in the IAU's 2015 naming vote to match their ghoulish host. Poltergeist (4.3 Earth masses, 66.5-day orbit) and Phobetor (3.9 Earth masses, 98.2 days) are rocky super-Earths, while Draugr, at about 0.02 Earth masses — less than twice the mass of our Moon — remains the lowest-mass planet known. Bathed in deadly radiation from the pulsar, these worlds probably condensed from the wreckage of the supernova itself: planets born from a star's death.
Featured model: Pulsar planets · about 2,300 light-years away · Virgo
14. HD 209458 b (Osiris)
HD 209458 b, informally called Osiris, is the planet of firsts. Orbiting a Sun-like star 157 light-years away in Pegasus, it was the first exoplanet seen to transit its star (in September 1999) and the first detected by more than one method. It circles in just 3.52 days at 0.047 AU, with a dayside temperature of about 1,499 K. In 2001 Hubble detected sodium in its atmosphere — the first atmosphere ever measured on an exoplanet. Then, in 2003, astronomers found an enormous ellipsoidal envelope of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen escaping from the planet, reaching temperatures around 10,000 °C and extending some 200,000 kilometres: the first evaporating exoplanet atmosphere ever observed. The nickname Osiris, proposed by the team that found the escaping envelope, refers to the Egyptian god who lost part of his body — a fitting name for a world, about two-thirds the mass of Jupiter but some 1.3 times its diameter, that is slowly losing itself to space.
Featured model: Hot Jupiter · about 157 light-years away · Pegasus
How to choose
Start with the real decision: who will use this, where, how often, and what would make the choice unsafe or disappointing? The following checks keep the shortlist practical.
- Documented measurements: every planet's distance, temperature, size and orbital period is as stated by NASA, ESA, ESO or the peer-reviewed discovery literature — nothing is rounded into a claim the sources do not make.
- Genuine strangeness: each world breaks a rule of our own solar system — extreme heat or cold, a double sunset, a comet-like tail of escaping atmosphere, or an orbit around a stellar corpse.
- A range of extremes: the list spans the record-holders (hottest, darkest, closest, first found) and the unsettled cases (K2-18b, GJ 504 b) where the science is still moving.
- Honest imagery: only artist's impressions and observatory imagery released by space agencies are used, each with its licence and credit recorded; unsettled interpretations are labelled as such.
- Firsts that mattered: several entries pioneered techniques — first transiting planet, first measured atmosphere, first exoplanet colour — that the whole field now relies on.
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Editorial update
Every planet in this list was chosen because its strangeness is documented, not imagined: each entry rests on published measurements from missions and observatories such as NASA's Kepler, Hubble, Spitzer and James Webb telescopes, ESA's CoRoT, and major ground-based surveys. Distances, temperatures and orbital periods are given as the sources state them, hedged where the science is unsettled — the mass of GJ 504 b, for example, depends on its system's age, and the possible biosignature gas reported around K2-18b is explicitly flagged as contested. One honesty note on the pictures: no telescope can photograph the surface of a planet light-years away, so every image in this article is an artist's impression produced by NASA, ESA, ESO or the discovery teams, credited and licensed in the pack's sources file. They show what astronomers believe these worlds look like based on the data — nothing more, and nothing less.
Frequently asked questions
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Is this a fixed ranking?
No. The refreshed page is an editorial starting point organised by fit and evidence. The right choice depends on your use case, location, budget, and timing.
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