Exoplanets

Our planet Earth revolves around our sun (a star) with seven other planets and we refer to it as our solar system. There are other stars in our galaxy with other planets. 

So far, NASA has found five thousand such planets. Scientists have been looking for them, the "exoplanets," for years (here are some of them explaining why they do that).

Our home planet is so suited for life and seems so normal to us that the others can seem surprisingly, even shockingly, weird. One is frozen, like Hoth from the Star Wars movies. Astronomers think of another one as Tatooine (again, from Star Wars) because it circles around two suns (stars).

Here's one that rains shards of glass in a furious horizontal wind:

from Mindmatters