Most modelled planets cluster around a pale, cool blue-grey. These ten are the outliers — the colours least like everything else in the catalogue, and each one strange for its own physical reason: a sun so red it stains the whole planet amber, air so hot the clouds have boiled away, methane swallowing the red end of the spectrum. Each stop is also visibly different from the others, so this is ten kinds of strange rather than one strangeness ten times.
How picked
Picked automatically from the current data: the planets whose modelled colour sits furthest (in perceptual ΔE) from the catalogue's median colour, skipping any that would look like a stop already on the list, one per star system.
Honesty
Modelled colours, not photographs. Some sit outside the range a screen can display; where that happens the swatch is the closest colour your screen can show and the planet page flags it as out of gamut.
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ΔE 41 from average
WISEP J121756.91+162640.2 A b
WISEP J121756.91+162640.2 A · 575 K · T8.5Modelled
Its modelled colour sits ΔE 41 from the catalogue's median — its host is not a star at all but a brown dwarf at 575 K, which puts out almost nothing except red and infrared light, so the colour owes more to the star than to the planet; underneath that, methane in its cold air absorbs the red end of the spectrum, leaving blue-green.
⚠ ABOUT THIS SWATCHThis colour falls outside the range a screen can display — the swatch is the closest your screen can get.
Its modelled colour sits ΔE 33 from the catalogue's median — its host is not a star at all but a brown dwarf at 2,375 K, which puts out almost nothing except red and infrared light, so the colour owes more to the star than to the planet; underneath that, methane in its cold air absorbs the red end of the spectrum, leaving blue-green.
⚠ ABOUT THIS SWATCHThis colour falls outside the range a screen can display — the swatch is the closest your screen can get.
Its modelled colour sits ΔE 28 from the catalogue's median — bright water clouds scatter most of the starlight straight back, and its 3,022 K red-dwarf sun tilts the whole colour warmer.
Its modelled colour sits ΔE 24 from the catalogue's median — bright water clouds scatter most of the starlight straight back, and its 3,551 K red-dwarf sun tilts the whole colour warmer.
Its modelled colour sits ΔE 24 from the catalogue's median — it is too hot for clouds to survive, so almost nothing comes back; the little that does is blue light scattered off bare hydrogen, the way our own sky is blue, and its 10,000 K blue-white sun pushes it cooler.
⚠ ABOUT THIS SWATCHThis colour falls outside the range a screen can display — the swatch is the closest your screen can get.
Its modelled colour sits ΔE 16 from the catalogue's median — methane in its cold air absorbs the red end of the spectrum, leaving blue-green, and its 3,141 K red-dwarf sun tilts the whole colour warmer.
HOW THESE 10 WERE PICKED
Picked automatically from the current data: the planets whose modelled colour sits furthest (in perceptual ΔE) from the catalogue's median colour, skipping any that would look like a stop already on the list, one per star system.