With temperatures ranging from 1000 to 2000°C, gravity 15 times stronger than Earth’s, and a year that lasts just 5. 6 of our days, HAT-P-2b is not a planet you’d want to visit for vacation. The unusual gas giant – located 440 light-years away in the constellation Hercules -turns out to be the most massive planet found outside our solar system so far. Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, spotted the superdense planet using the HATNet global network of automated telescopes, which scans a large fraction of the Northern Hemisphere sky every night to search for planets. HAT-P-2b, the second planet the project has discovered, stunned scientists with far-out features unprecedented for an alien world. HAt-P-2b is but one of the odd planets in the cosmos. Journey further into space with this documentary, and discover the weirdest planets of our universe.
