9 Ways You're Picturing Aliens Wrong

7. Wind Surfers

In our search for habitable exoplanets, we're discovering more and more that are tidally locked with their parent star. This means that their rotation and orbit have synchronised so that one side is always facing the star and experiences endless scorching summer, and one is plunged into eternal, freezing night.

You'd think that these conditions would make them pretty inhospitable, but many astrobiologists reckon that the point at which these two opposites meet could just hit the sweet spot for life. Any aliens living in the perpetual twilight zone would be pretty different from here on Earth.

One consequence of such an extreme environment is that the temperate band would constantly have a tornado-like storm blowing through it as the warm and cool air from either side of the planet meets and mingles.

On this planet, the primordial soup that gives rise to life might not have been on land, but in the skies, and the life that arises from it would be adapted to a life in the air. They might have enormous wingspans or simply large, flat bodies; they might be made up of colonies of much smaller organisms clinging together for dear life.