The Most Disturbing Planets Ever Discovered

Imagine looking up at the sky and watching not one, but three suns slowly arc across the horizon. That's not a scene from a movie. That's just a Tuesday on HD 188753AB. This planet exists inside a triple star system, something astronomers once thought was basically impossible for a planet to survive in. There's a central yellow star, very similar to our own sun, and then two smaller stars locked in a tight orbit around each other, both of them circling that main star together. If you were standing on a moon around this giant, your body would cast three separate shadows, pointing in three completely different directions. True darkness might never arrive at all. But here's where it gets scientifically disturbing. This planet has no business existing. Gas giants are supposed to form in the cold, outer edges of a solar system, far from stellar heat, where there's enough raw material to slowly build something the size of Jupiter. Then, over millions of years, they drift inward. The problem is that the two companion stars in this system sit so close that they would have physically cut off the supply of dust and gas needed to build a planet in the first place. The math doesn't work. The planet shouldn't be there. And yet the data said it was. That discovery was announced in 2005. Then in 2007, a separate team pointed their instruments at the same spot in the sky and found absolutely nothing. Not a trace. They stated clearly that if the planet was real, their equipment would have detected it. No confirmation has come since. The planet that should never have existed might not exist at all. It could be a ghost. Now, let's talk about a planet that experiences the most violent weather event in the known universe on a regular schedule. HD 80606 b doesn't orbit its star the way Earth orbits the Sun. It follows a path that looks more like a comet than a planet. For roughly 100 days, it drifts through the freezing outer darkness. Then something terrifying begins. The planet starts falling toward its star. In just 20 hours, it screams inward, whips around at an insanely close distance, and then slingshots back out into the cold. This happens over and over again, every single orbit, for billions of years. During that close approach, the planet receives over 800 times the energy Earth gets from the Sun. The temperature on its surface rockets from around 930 degrees Fahrenheit to over 2,000 degrees in just 6 hours. If you were floating in its atmosphere, you would watch the star swell in the sky until it looked 30 times larger than our Sun appears from Earth. That explosion of heat triggers shockwave storms. Winds erupt at 11,000 miles per hour as the atmosphere simply cannot cope with the sudden energy dump. Then the planet swings back out, cools within hours, and becomes so cold it actually disappears from infrared telescopes entirely. Normally, a star's gravity gradually pulls a planet's stretched orbit into a circle over time. HD 80606 b appears to resist this completely. Scientists believe it is unusually rigid, and that resistance may have locked it into this torture loop for another 10 billion years. The first exoplanets ever confirmed orbit something that has no right to have planets at all. The star is called Lich, named after an undead creature from fantasy mythology that commands the dead. That name was not chosen accidentally. Lich is a pulsar, a neutron star spinning 160 times every single second, blasting out beams of deadly radiation like a cosmic lighthouse on overdrive. Its surface burns at over 52,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Three planets orbit it, and they are named after monsters too. These are zombie worlds. They almost certainly formed from the wreckage left behind when two white dwarf stars collided and merged billions of years ago. Standing on any of them would mean living under a sky lit by a violent strobe light flashing 160 times per second while radiation poured down and sterilized everything. No atmosphere, no life. Just dead rock endlessly circling a spinning stellar corpse. Most planets reflect some portion of the light that hits them. TRES-2b reflects almost none of it. Discovered in 2011, this gas giant near Jupiter's size absorbs over 99% of all incoming light, making it darker than coal, darker than black paint, darker than almost any material found on Earth. It orbits its star so closely that surface temperatures exceed 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit, which eliminates any possibility of the reflective ammonia clouds that make planets like Jupiter bright. Instead, its atmosphere is likely packed with light-devouring chemicals, including vaporized sodium, potassium, and gaseous titanium oxide. Even accounting for all of those, astronomers still cannot fully explain why it's this dark. The numbers don't add up. You wouldn't see a black void if you flew past it, though. Because it's so hot, TRES-2b glows with a faint, deep red light, like a dying coal in a fireplace, floating in the dark. WASP-17b breaks two rules at once, and scientists are still trying to fully explain how. First, it orbits its star backwards. Almost every planet ever observed travels in the same rotational direction as its parent star. WASP-17b goes the opposite way entirely. The leading theory is that it suffered a catastrophic near-collision with another planet early in its history, something violent enough to flip its entire orbital path. Second, despite being nearly twice the width of Jupiter, making it one of the largest planets ever found, it contains only half of Jupiter's mass. That combination makes it so extraordinarily puffy and low-density that if you could find a bathtub large enough, the entire planet would float. It is essentially a hot balloon the size of a small star. In 2023, the James Webb Space Telescope made things stranger. It detected clouds in the atmosphere made of quartz crystals. Not water ice, not ammonia. Quartz. At temperatures around 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, silicate crystals form directly out of superheated gas and drift through the sky. WASP-127b holds a record that sounds impossible until you think about it. Winds on this planet race around its equator at 20,500 miles per hour. For context, the fastest winds ever recorded anywhere in our solar system are on Neptune at around 1,200 miles per hour. On WASP-127b, that would be considered calm. These aren't just fast winds. They are a supersonic jet stream completely encircling the planet, moving six times faster than the planet itself rotates. Astronomers detected them by watching how different parts of the atmosphere shifted the light of the star during a transit. Part of the gas was moving toward us, part was moving away, both at extraordinary speed. The only explanation that fits the data is a continuous equatorial windstorm that never stops. GJ436b is a planet doing something that shouldn't be physically possible. At around 820 degrees Fahrenheit, it's hot enough to melt lead. But scientists believe the interior of this planet is made of ice. Not cold ice, hot ice. Water squeezed so hard by the planet's immense gravitational pressure that it is forced into a solid state even at temperatures that would liquefy most metals. The atmosphere is chemically wrong as well, filled with carbon monoxide where models predict methane should dominate. Then there's the tail. The star blasts GJ436b with so much radiation that hydrogen is being stripped from its atmosphere and flung into space, forming a comet-like tail stretching over 8 million miles behind it. And unlike virtually every other planet in any observed system, this one orbits over the poles of its star, moving in a near-vertical loop rather than circling the equator the way planets are supposed to. Astronomers suspect a hidden, massive companion planet, still undetected, pushed it out of a normal orbit long ago. The culprit remains invisible in the dark while this world slowly burns. KOI-55b should not exist, and in a sense, it almost doesn't. This is a planet that was swallowed alive. Its star expanded into a red giant roughly 18 million years ago, and the planet did not just get close to it, it plunged inside. It went through the outer layers of a burning ball of plasma and survived. The star stripped away everything. Every trace of gas was evaporated. What's left is only the scorched, rocky core, smaller than Earth, still burning at around 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit millions of years after the event. It now completes a full orbit in under six hours. If you could somehow reach its surface, you would vaporize before your brain could register that you'd arrived. LTT-9779b is the most reflective planet ever discovered, and its clouds are made of metal. This world reflects about 73% of all the light that hits it, acting like a giant mirror drifting through space. Those clouds are not made of water vapor or ice. They are made of vaporized metals and silicates that condense high in the atmosphere into a permanent metallic layer. Temperatures on the star-facing side reach over 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit. It orbits its star in under 24 hours, and it exists in a region of space called the Neptunian Desert, an area so close to a star that planets of this size simply should not be able to retain their atmospheres. The radiation should have stripped it bare long ago. The fact that its atmosphere is heavy with metals is the only reason it has survived. In 2008, astronomers photographed a planet for one of the first times in history. They named it Fomalhaut b, and they watched it move across a ring of debris over several years. Then it started behaving strangely. It showed no heat signature. It drifted off course. And then, by 2014, it was simply gone. A 2020 study delivered the answer. There was never a planet there at all. Two enormous icy asteroids, each around 120 miles wide, had collided at extreme velocity just before the first images were taken. The glowing dot astronomers tracked for years was an expanding cloud of debris from that crash, slowly spreading through space until it became too thin to see. An entire planet discovery, celebrated and named, turned out to be the aftermath of a collision. An echo. Nothing more. KELT-9b is the hottest planet ever found, and it is being destroyed in slow motion. It orbits a massive blue-white star so closely that its year lasts less than 36 hours. One side of the planet permanently faces the star and bakes at over 7,700 degrees Fahrenheit. That's hotter than many stars. At these temperatures, molecules like water and carbon dioxide are ripped apart at the atomic level. Iron and titanium don't form rocks on this world. They evaporate into gas. Those gases are carried by winds to the slightly cooler night side, where they may briefly condense before being swept back around to evaporate again, cycling endlessly. The radiation pressure is puffing the planet up, making it physically larger over time. Meanwhile, the star is stripping away around 10 million tons of its material every single second, dragging a comet-like tale of lost atmosphere behind it. Within a billion years, the star will expand into a red giant and finish what it started. Finally, a planet with no star at all. PSJ 318.5-22 drifts alone through the void between star systems, orbiting nothing, illuminated by nothing, belonging to nothing. It was either ejected violently from its home system during formation, or it coalesced on its own in open space, which means it may never have had a star to begin with. You might expect a starless world to be a frozen wasteland, but this one glows. It is only about 23 million years old in cosmic terms, still radiating heat from the energy of its own formation. Telescopes watching it have seen it change in brightness, indicating massive storm systems rotating across its surface every few hours. Those storms are not made of water. The highest clouds are composed of fine quartz grains. Deeper down, the clouds are made of liquid iron, raining molten metal through an atmosphere that has never once seen a sunrise. It drifts on, alone, in the dark, going nowhere. Thanks for watching, and if you want to follow the evidence to the edge of time, subscribe to Cosmorium 4K. The next mystery is already waiting in the dark.