25 Mysteries of Star Systems Like Ours - Resonant Planetary Chains Explained

What if our solar system is the cosmic outlier, and the real secrets of planetary formation hide in star systems that defy every rule we thought we understood? The Kepler mission revealed thousands of worlds orbiting distant stars, but each discovery raises more questions than it answers. Gas giants orbit closer to their suns than Mercury does to ours, completing years in mere days. Planets exist in perfect mathematical harmony, locked in resonant chains like cosmic gears. Some worlds are actively disintegrating, leaving comet-like trails of vapor across space, while others drift alone through the frozen void between stars with no sun to call home. We find planets less dense than cotton candy and others that somehow survived the violent death of their parent star. The most common planet types in the galaxy do not even exist in our solar system, and the chaotic architectures of these distant systems suggest violent pasts filled with migration, collision, and gravitational chaos that our orderly arrangement either avoided or erased from memory. From tidally locked eyeball worlds to planets orbiting binary stars like Tatooine, from the mystery of missing exomoons to the tantalizing hunt for biosignatures in alien atmospheres, these 25 profound puzzles challenge everything we know about how planetary systems form, evolve, and perhaps harbor life. Which mystery makes you wonder most about whether the conditions that created Earth are rare cosmic accidents or common blueprints repeated across the universe?