Fire hydrants that resemble planets? Totally. I wouldn’t mind betting that you’d probably find life of some sort on at least a couple of these planets as well.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, may be home to some 100 billion planets, 1500 of which could be within just 50 light years of Earth, according to some recent statistical calculations.

Better extend the USS Enterprise’s “five year mission” me thinks.

The number of apparently life sustaining exoplanets, or planets beyond the solar system, that are coming to our attention is growing, so it makes sense that there be a database, or catalogue, of such bodies.

Conditions on a cube shaped planet, which one could safely say are fairly rare, would differ vastly from what we are used to, but are fascinating none the less.

On the plus side, the view is like none on earth, or on any planet anywhere. You can sight down one edge of the cube to a far corner, a distance of some 6,400 miles. Even more strikingly, you see all the atmosphere and water has been concentrated by gravity into a blob in the middle of each face, with the corners and edges poking out into space. You realize your cubical planet isn’t one world but six, each face’s segment of the biosphere isolated from the others by the hopeless climb.

Six isolated biospheres on a cube shaped planet… that would surely make for a great premise for some sort of science fiction story.

This month, July, marks the passing of the first full Neptunian year since the gas giant was discovered by astronomers on Earth.

According to those tables of numbers you get in books about the Solar System, the planet Neptune takes 164.79 years to travel once around the Sun. And Neptune was discovered 164.77 years ago as I write this post (1st July 2011). This means our blue ice giant has still not made even one full journey around the Sun since being spotted and recognised for the first time by humans. At some point this month, that “first” orbit will be completed. The inhabitants of Neptune will be wryly noting the first anniversary of the inhabitants of Earth first realising we were looking at their planet.

The best way to go about finding extraterrestrial life is to narrow down the search range as best as possible. Certain types of stars, such as the Sun, are considered more likely to host life bearing planets, with older, rather than younger, planets orbiting such stars seen as the best bet for harbouring life forms.

In the biology game, planetary age can be everything. If alien astronomers had discovered Earth when it was just a billion years old, the only life they’d be able to find would be the most primitive of microbes. If they waited another billion years, they’d see the effects of cyanobacteria pumping oxygen into the atmosphere. At about 4 billion, multicellular organisms would arise. And if the aliens wanted someone to talk to, they’d have to wait until Earth had been around for 4.6 billion years, when humans began communicating with radio signals.

There could be a sizeable number of planets drifting alone through the cosmos – that are not in orbit around a star – according to Japanese astronomers, who have identified ten such bodies that appear to be no where near a host star.

Ten objects does not sound like a lot, but microlensing events are very rare, because they require the precise alignment of a background star, the planet “lens” and Earth. So the researchers say the new observations imply that lonely planets are 50 per cent more common than planets that have host stars and nearly twice as common as stars in the galaxy.

Such planets were likely evicted from the planetary system they formed in as a result of gravitational tussles with other bodies orbiting their host star.

A video of the approach to Saturn, the solar system’s second largest planet, made up of individual high-resolution photos taken by the Cassini spacecraft, which have been stitched together to create a motion representation of the journey.

A companion piece to the ambient sounds of Jupiter perhaps?

Astronomers believe that yet to be analysed data collected by NASA’s WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) telescope will prove that a giant planet, up to four times the mass of Jupiter, which they are calling Tyche, orbits the Sun on the extreme outer edge of the solar system, in a region referred to as the Oort Cloud.

The hunt is on for a gas giant up to four times the mass of Jupiter thought to be lurking in the outer Oort Cloud, the most remote region of the solar system. The orbit of Tyche (pronounced ty-kee), would be 15,000 times farther from the Sun than the Earth’s, and 375 times farther than Pluto’s, which is why it hasn’t been seen so far.

A variation of the Nemesis theory, which states that a red or brown dwarf star orbits somewhere in the same region, perhaps?

A recording of the ambient and oddly rhythmic sounds generated by the solar system’s largest planet Jupiter, made during the Voyager space probe fly-bys of the late 1970s… this would make for eerily great music while driving along a lonely road late at night, but also isn’t half bad to work to either.