Strange lemon-shaped exoplanet defies the rules of planet formation
A distant world with carbon in its atmosphere and extraordinarily high temperatures is unlike any other planet we’ve seen, and it’s unclear how it could have formed
Space
A distant world with carbon in its atmosphere and extraordinarily high temperatures is unlike any other planet we’ve seen, and it’s unclear how it could have formed
By Leah Crane
17 December 2025
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An artist’s impression of PSR J2322-2650b
NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)
Astronomers have found what appears to be one of the strangest known worlds in the universe. It orbits a type of rapidly spinning neutron star called a pulsar – this in itself is unusual, but it is far from the weirdest thing about the exoplanet PSR J2322-2650b.
Michael Zhang at the University of Chicago and his colleagues spotted the odd planet, which is more than 2000 light years away from Earth, via the James Webb Space Telescope, and immediately noticed that something about it was unusual. The spectrum of light they measured coming from it didn’t show the usual water and carbon dioxide we would expect to find on a Jupiter-mass world like this one, but instead molecules of carbon.
