Hot Jupiter CoRoT-2b Rotates Backward, Defying Planetary Models

Since 1995, the discovery of hot Jupiters has steadily dismantled our assumption that the cosmos arranges its worlds as our own solar system does. Now, the exoplanet CoRoT-2b — already among the strangest of these close-orbiting giants — has revealed yet another defiance of expectation: it spins backward relative to its orbit, so slowly that a single day outlasts its entire year. Observed through the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, this retrograde rotation reminds us that the universe is not obligated to conform to the models we build in its image, and that each