9 Weirdest Alien Worlds We've Already Found

Gravity is one hell of a drug.

When a planet orbits extremely close to it's host star, the effect of gravity on it can be devastating. The gas giant WASP-12b is just such a planet, with an orbit so close to its star that it has been stretched into an elongated egg shape.

I the same way that the moon causes a tidal "bump" on the surface of the Earth, the star WASP-12 - a magnitude 11 yellow dwarf star - pulls the surface of the planet towards it.

As well as this being another exciting thing to add to the list of cosmic weirdness, it's also a handy way of telling what these alien world are made of. How much the planet is distorted, give us a good idea of what is going on under the surface, like squeezing a melon to check its ripeness - at least according to Gregory Laughlin of the University of California.

A gaseous planet is going to be much more flexible that a rocky one and, seeing as we are looking for rocky planets that might harbour alien life, this kind of information could be extremely useful to an astronomer.