Scientists just found a planet that's stranger than you can imagine

Imagine a distant planet where life could potentially thrive — but perhaps only on one particularly bright side. 
Astronomers announced the discovery of a world beyond our solar system, an exoplanet dubbed Wolf 1069 b. Their finding, recently published in the science journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, is intriguing exoplanet research for a number of reasons:

• Wolf 1069 b is around the same mass of Earth. That's rare. Among thousands of confirmed exoplanets, "only about 1.5 percent have masses below two Earth masses," notes a release from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, a research institute in Germany. Importantly, we know from experience that rocky, Earth-like worlds can create conditions that might allow life to survive.

• Even rarer, Wolf 1069 b orbits in its solar system's "habitable zone," meaning a special region where liquid water can exist on the surface.

• To researchers' current knowledge (this can change with more observation), the planet isn't being pummeled with harmful radiation. Wolf 1069 b orbits a star (Wolf 1069) that's smaller and cooler than the sun, allowing the world to orbit pretty close and still be a potentially habitable world. The planet orbits its small star every 15.6 days!

• A weird quirk: Like the moon, Wolf 1069 b is "tidally locked" in its orbit, meaning the same side is constantly facing the red dwarf star. As a result, the planet's "dayside" is perpetually day, and the nightside perpetually night.

So, if you stood on the star-facing side of Wolf 1069 b, a year would last about 16 days, the sun wouldn't set, gravity might be similar to that on Earth, and you might even find water sloshing over the surface.
Crucially, however, there's still no evidence of life in the universe beyond Earth — though there are exciting contenders for potential habitability in our own solar system. "A habitable planet can be habitable but not inhabited," Ravi Kumar Kopparapu, an exoplanet researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Mashable earlier this year.
Scientists just found a planet that's stranger than you can imagine