9 Weirdest Alien Worlds We've Already Found

In our slow plod around the sun, we experience days, months, seasons and years with clockwork regularity. On corkscrew planets, things are a little more topsy turvy.

Rather than the flat, circular orbit around a star that we're used to seeing, these planets ping-pong between two different stars in a crazy, helter-skelter helical orbit.

Theoretical physicist Eugene Oks of Auburn University in Alabama wrote a paper for The Astrophysical Journal describing the behaviour of these whirling worlds.

Seasons would cycle through in a matter of days, the surface would be bathed in perpetual but shifting daylight from the two stars, and the night skies would be a truly bizarre spectacle.

These planets are proving pretty elusive and are theoretical at the moment. Due to their crazy orbits they would be pretty difficult to pin down anyway and Oks thinks hat the best way to spot them would be through detecting the gravity ways they send rippling out into space.

Who knows, perhaps one day these kinds of planets will make a great adventure holiday destination for the space tourists of the future.