My Favorite Planets in Our Galaxy.

Bryce helms, May 15th, 2023

WASP-12b.Just three million or so years from its eventual fiery demise, WASP-12b is spiraling inexorably inwards towards doom at the hands of its yellow dwarf host star.

New research has shown that the planet, located 600 lightyears away in the Auriga constellation, is now so close that it’s begun wobbling and distorting under the spell of the star’s gravity, while intense stellar radiation has caused it to swell up so much that it’s falling apart.The reason this planet is in 10th place on the list is because personally I feel bad for the Exoplanet, along with that it is shaped like an egg because of the gravitational pull from its star which I find kinda funny.

TrES-2b.“It's so…black! You can hardly make out its shape…light just seems to fall into it!” Hitchhiker’s’ Ford Prefect 'may have been describing Hotblack Desiato’s limoship, but he could just as easily have been talking about TrES-2b. Identified by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope in 2011, it’s the darkest known exoplanet, reflecting less than 1% of any light that hits it.

TrES-2b orbits a star about 750 light years away in the direction of the constellation Draco and is the darkest planet or moon ever discovered. “It’s darker than the blackest lump of coal, than dark acrylic paint you might paint with. It’s just ridiculous how dark this planet is,” said study lead-author David Kipping from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.The reason this exoplanet is in 9th place is the fact that there is almost no light which I enjoy and it contains mainly of my favorite colors Red and Black.

2MASS J21265040−8140293, also known as 2MASS J2126−8140,[2] is an exoplanet orbiting the red dwarf TYC 9486-927-1, 111.4±0.3[5] light-years away from Earth. Its estimated mass, age (10-45 million years), spectral type (L3), and Teff (1800 K) are similar to the well-studied planet β Pictoris b.[2] With an estimated distance of around 1 trillion kilometers from its host star, it is one of the largest solar systems ever found.[6].The reason this exoplanet is in 8th place is because it is very lonely which I respect because I had to go through the same thing, but along with that I find the planet interesting.Though I have one complaint being the fact that this exoplanets name takes forever to type.

Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object to directly orbit the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume, by a small margin, but is slightly less massive than Eris. Like other Kuiper belt objects, Pluto is made primarily of ice and rock and is much smaller than the inner planets. Pluto has only one sixth the mass of Earth's moon, and one third its volume.

Pluto has a moderately eccentric and inclined orbit, ranging from 30 to 49 astronomical units (4.5 to 7.3 billion kilometers; 2.8 to 4.6 billion miles) from the Sun. Light from the Sun takes 5.5 hours to reach Pluto at its orbital distance of 39.5 AU (5.91 billion km; 3.67 billion mi). Pluto's eccentric orbit periodically brings it closer to the Sun than Neptune, but a stable orbital resonance prevents them from colliding.

Pluto has five known moons: Charon, the largest, whose diameter is just over half that of Pluto; Styx; Nix; Kerberos; and Hydra. Pluto and Charon are sometimes considered a binary system because the barycenter of their orbits does not lie within either body, and they are tidally locked. The New Horizons mission was the first spacecraft to visit Pluto and its moons, making a flyby on July 14, 2015 and taking detailed measurements and observations.

Pluto was discovered in 1930, the first object in the Kuiper belt. It was immediately hailed as the ninth planet, but it was always the odd object out,[14]: 27  and its planetary status was questioned when it was found to be much smaller than expected. These doubts increased following the discovery of additional objects in the Kuiper belt starting in the 1990s, and particularly the more massive scattered disk object Eris in 2005. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) formally redefined the term planet to exclude dwarf planets such as Pluto. Many planetary astronomers, however, continue to consider Pluto and other dwarf planets to be planets.The reason Pluto is in 7th is the fact that I find the planet cute cause it’s just so small, along with that after finding out it was not a planet I screamed at the top of my lungs.Fun fact Mickey mouses dog Pluto was the inspiration of the dwarf planets name.

Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only place known in the universe where life has originated and found habitability. While Earth may not contain the largest volumes of water in the Solar System, only Earth sustains liquid surface water, extending over 70.8% of the Earth with its ocean, making Earth an ocean world. Earth's polar regions currently retain most of all other water with large sheets of ice covering ocean and land, dwarfing Earth's groundwater, lakes, rivers and atmospheric water. Land, consisting of continents and islands, extends over 29.2% of the Earth and is widely covered by vegetation. Below Earth's surface material lies Earth's crust consisting of several slowly moving tectonic plates, which interact to produce mountain ranges, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Earth's liquid outer core generates a magnetic field that shapes the magnetosphere of Earth, largely deflecting destructive solar winds and cosmic radiation.The reason earth gets 6th place is the fact that I mean I live here. What would you expect?  it is not the first because it has many problems happening and it is not in very good conditions, for example Nuclear weapons and global warming.

ROXs 42Bb is a directly imaged planetary-mass companion[1] to the binary M star ROXs 42B,[4] a likely member of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex. The companion was announced/discovered on October 17, 2013, by University of Toronto astronomer Thayne Currie.

The object has an estimated mass around 9 Jupiter masses, depending on the age of the star,[1] similar to the masses of directly imaged planets around HR 8799 and beta Pictoris. However, it is unclear whether ROXs 42Bb formed like these planets via core accretion, formed by disk (gravitational) instability, or formed more like a binary star. Preliminary fits of the spectra and broadband photometry to atmospheric models imply an effective temperature of about 2,000 K for a radius of 2.43 ± 0.18 RJ or about 2150 K for a radius of 2.55 ± 0.20 RJ.[3] Like Beta Pictoris b, ROXs 42Bb's atmosphere is likely very cloudy and dusty.[3]

The reason this exoplanet gets 5th is the fact that it looks cool and holy cow is it big.

CFBDSIR 2149-0403 (full designation CFBDSIR J214947.2-040308.9) is a free-floating planetary-mass object or possibly a high-metallicity, low-mass brown dwarf in the constellation Aquarius. Originally, it was thought to be part of the AB Doradus moving group (ABDMG) as indicated by its position and proper motion,[1][2] but the same team that discovered the object and conjectured its membership in the group has now rejected that hypothesis due to newer measurements. Without that membership, the age and mass of the object cannot be constrained.[3] There is insufficient evidence to demonstrate that CFBDSIR 2149-0403 formed as a planet and was subsequently ejected.Free floating planets that are like CFBDSIR 2149-0403 are known as, "Rough planets/exoplanets." because these kinds of planets orbit no star and kinda just float through space.The reason this exoplanet is in 4th is that fact that this planet is living a life of its own,floating in space free to go anywhere it would like sounds fun.Though I am worried about the fact that it can hit other planets.

Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest planet in our solar system. Adorned with thousands of beautiful ringlets, Saturn is unique among the planets. It is not the only planet to have rings – made of chunks of ice and rock – but none are as spectacular or as complicated as Saturn's. Like fellow gas giant Jupiter, Saturn is a massive ball made mostly of hydrogen and helium. The reason Saturn gets 3rd place is because it is very pretty with its rings.And not to mention that it RAINS DIAMOND SHARDS!My only complaint is the fact that it will lose its rings in a few hundred million years.

Astronomer Eric Mamajek at the University of Rochester and his co-author from the Leiden Observatory, The Netherlands,a country  have discovered that the ring system that they see eclipse the very young Sun-like star J1407b is of enormous proportions, much larger and heavier than the ring system of Saturn. The ring system – the first of its kind to be found outside our solar system – was discovered in 2012 by a team led by Rochester’s Eric Mamajek.

A new analysis of the data, led by Leiden’s Matthew Kenworthy, shows that the ring system consists of over 30 rings, each of them tens of millions of kilometers in diameter. Furthermore, they found gaps in the rings, which indicate that satellites (“exomoons”) may have formed. The result has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. The reason this exoplanet got 2nd is pretty obvious, I mean just look at these rings compared to the planet, I was just as surprised as you probably are.

55 Cancri e, also known as Janssen, orbits a star called Copernicus only 41 light years away. The molten surface is completely uninhabitable, but above the burning horizon, Janssen’s sister planet, Galileo, hangs in a dark sky. Silicates in the atmosphere would condense into clouds on the tidally-locked planet's darkside reflecting the lava below. So, the skies would sparkle.

55 Cancri e is a super-Earth exoplanet that orbits a G-type star similar to our Sun. Its mass is 8.08 Earths, it takes 0.7 days to complete one orbit of its star, and is 0.01544 AU from its star. Its discovery was announced in 2004. This planet is my favorite because it is made out of SOLID DIAMOND The planet has a very high gravitational pull and its atmosphere consists mainly of carbon and the high gravitational pull would compress the carbon with its hot surface and boom diamond is formed, also I do not know why the diamond is under the lave surface.

I released a form out into google classroom and asked, “What is the best planet on this list?” Here are the results. First we have all the exoplanets that got no votes, we have Roxs 42Bb, 2MASS J2126, WASP-12b, j1407b, and Saturn.

 Then for the exoplanets that have 1 vote, we have TrES-2b and 55 Cancri e.

 And for the exoplanets with 2 votes we got CFBDSIR2149, Pluto, and Earth.

And Finally a little quote from Emmett Penter, “Why do these planet's names sound like Wifi passwords?” good question Emmett and let me tell you I have no clue what Elon and his crew were thinking when naming these planets.

Those were my favorite planets in our galaxy all being special in their own way like how Pluto is small, Earth has life, and 55 Cancri e is made of diamonds.These planets/exoplanets are very interesting and rare.Bye and have a nice day.

Author bio:Bryce is a 6th grader who is actually pretty interested in planets, stars, and more, Bryce also loves being a Journalist here at EJHS.

Links I used: https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/weirdest-exoplanets-universe/ 

https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/alien-worlds/strange-new-worlds/ 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2MASS_J2126%E2%80%938140