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Tech

These Alien Planets Are the Stuff of Nightmares

One even looks like the Eye of Sauron.

There are potentially thousands of exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system. In the spirit of Halloween, scientific YouTube channel DNews lays out just a few alien exoplanets that sound "horrific" to us, Earthlings.

For starters, the exoplanet 55 Cancri e is oozing with poisonous liquid. About 40 light years away, it's known as a "super Earth," about eight times larger the mass of our home planet and much hotter because it's so close to its star. In fact, the high heat of the planet has made it so that water and other liquids are unable to exist in their regular liquid state, pushing them to "supercritical" states under the pressure. The fluids become exotic, oozing non-liquids, also gleaming with the poisonous hydrogen cyanide, oozing below the surface of 55 Cancri e.

Similar to Jupiter, except larger and hotter, is exoplanet CoRoT-2a. The planet orbits very close to its star, so it's now bloated due to extreme heating. Powerful ex-rays perpetually explode from the star, which cause five million tons of material to blast off the planet and into space every second.

Another exoplanet, Kepler-19b might have a ghost—okay, probably not, but the planet doesn't have a consistent orbit, which is anomalous. The planet will occasionally speed up and then slow down seemingly on its own, whereas it would seem that the planet would need some external force causing the abnormal orbit speeds. It could be, according to the video, that a "ghostly alien world" is tugging at Kepler-19b from afar.

The last of these scary, spooky exoplanets listed was Fomalhaut b, within the Fomalhaut star system. The planet resides in dusty debris 25 light years from Earth, making images of it look like the Eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings.

While none of these exoplanets would be pleasant to Earthling senses, the way aliens react to them is a different story. It's not clear what kind of life exists on these planets, if any, but if they're out there, they're probably much tougher than we are.