Far-out. Strange. Weird. It's what astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts think of their newest find, the planet HAT-P-2b, the second planet found with the HATnet global network of automated telescopes, as Kate Ravilious of National Geographic News reports.

The superdense gas giant, spotted 440 light-years away in the constellation Hercules, astounded astronomers by not only being the largest planet found so far, but by having a plethora of features so unique that those who have been studying it up to now can't stop talking about how weird it is.

In a statement given to National Geographic, Center of Astrophysics Gaspar Bakos had this to say:
"This planet is so unusual that at first we thought it was a false alarm—something that appeared to be a planet but wasn't. But we eliminated every other possibility, so we knew we had a really weird planet."

So what's really weird about HAT-P-2b anyhow? Well, for starters, its gravity is fifteen times stronger than that of our planet's, which would mean walking around with fifteen times your own body weight. Second, temperatures in HAT-P-2b can reach up from 1000° to 2000ºC, which is pretty hot. Third, a year on HAT-P-2b equals less than six days on Earth (Birthday parties every week! Yay!). Fourth, it's slightly bigger than Jupiter, but eight times as dense - and weighs just as much as 2,500 Earths.

But that's not really weird, you say, when you take into consideration that they're other planets, hence they're not really 'ordinary'. It's not just those factoids that have the astronomers over at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center all starry-eyed, though - it's HAT-P-2b's unusual boomerang orbit that's got their attention. To wit - HAT-P-2b closes to within 3.1 million miles (that's 5 million kilometers) of its star before swinging out to around 9.6 million miles (15 million kilometers) away, all in the span of 5.6 days. Now THAT's weird.

Despite all the weirdness, however, the boys in white may have an answer - another planet, hiding in the shadows of space, could be causing HAT-P-2b's elliptical orbit. "It is possible that [HAT-P-2b] is interacting with another planet further out that we haven't seen," Bakos says.