ALIEN LIFE & EXOPLANETS The Most Horrific Alien Planets In Our Galaxy p2

I SEE BRIGHT DANCING GHOSTS... EVERYWHERE
"I see dead people," said Haley Joel Osment in the 1999 ghost film The Sixth Sense when he broke the news to Bruce Willis that he has a rather unhealthy habit of seeing... well... dead people. [Spoiler!] It turned out that Willis was also one of those dead people.
Now, combine this with ancient folklore that said the aurora was in fact dancing souls of the dead (forget the aurora is, in reality, a beautiful side-effect of solar plasma raining through the upper atmosphere) and what do you get? We see dead people too! (It's a stretch, I know.)
So, if the aurora is interpreted as the souls of the dead, spare a thought for what you'd see if you lived on an exoplanet with a global magnetic field, orbiting close to its host star.
Scientists think that closely-orbiting "hot Jupiters" will experience awesome auroral displays as plasma from their nearby star floods their atmospheres. The result? Aurorae 100-1000 times brighter than the displays we see on Earth -- like ghosts dancing all over the planet.

LONER EXOPLANETS
Loners. Particularly weird loners with unpronounceable names. Carrying an axe. Hitchiking. Yep, that's scary -- a storyline that has been used for generations to scare the pants off cinema-goers.
So, what about loner exoplanets? There are thought to be loads of exoplanets out there, but a few of them are too small and too distant from their host stars to be detected by conventional telescopes. However, sometimes, astronomers get lucky and spot one of these extra-solar loners.
Take MOA-2009-BLG-266Lb for example. (Sounds like a weirdo, right?) It's a "super-Earth" that would normally orbit its star too far away to be spotted. But, with the help of general relativity, its 10-Earth mass bulk bends spacetime just enough to focus its star's light when seen from Earth. This is known as a "microlensing" event, and though rare, it can pick out tiny rocky worlds floating far from home.
And then there's the case of PSO J318.5-22 (pictured here) -- a free-floating exoplanet that appears to have lost its parent star all together. But then again, it might not be a planet at all, more of a "failed star." That moniker shouldn't give this lonely guy self esteem issues at all...
These exoplanetary loners may not be carrying an axe, but they do pose many questions as to how they evolved so far away from their stars (if they had stars in the first place, that is).

EXOPLANET GROWS A TAIL?
When Jeff Goldblum grew spiky hair and other weird fly-like appendages in the human-experimentation-gone-wrong horror movie The Fly, needless to say, his friends grossed out.
I'm sure exoplanet HD 209458b would sympathize with Goldblum's predicament. As it's orbiting close to its star, powerful stellar winds are stripping its atmosphere into space, creating a comet-like tail.
HD 209458b must be wondering why its exoplanet friends are pointing, nervously laughing and slowly backing away.
V. CH. QUETZ/MPIA

The Most Horrific Alien Planets In Our Galaxy

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