This weird 'hot Jupiter' exoplanet has a hotspot in the wrong place, and astronomers aren't sure how

Hot Jupiters are some of the most extreme planets in the universe, blazing gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn that exist so close to their stars that they complete orbits in a matter of days. Now, new research may rewrite the definition of these planets that make the solar system look a little bit mundane. The extrasolar planet, or exoplanet , at the heart of this rethink is CoRoT-2 b, a world with 3.5 times the mass of Jupiter and 1.5 times the size of our solar system's largest planet, located around 696 light-years away. It orbits its star in just 41 hours or so. What is so strange about CoRoT-2 b? Most hot Jupiters are tidally locked, meaning they have one side that permanently faces their stars, a "dayside," and a "nightside" that faces out into space in perpetuity. However, a new investigation of CoRoT-2 b seems to show that this hot Jupiter isn't tidally locked, and that is a big surprise, one that challenges all our assumptions about these extreme exoplanets . "I really like looking at the weird ones — finding planets that don't fit the standard picture — and doing some mystery solving," team leader Aurora Kesseli of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI) said in a statement. "Now we can see that a one-size-fits-all model does not work, even for planets that we've been studying for a long time. …