All the planets in our solar system orbit close to the sun's equatorial plane. Of the eight confirmed planets, the Earth's orbit is the most tilted, but even that tilt is still small, at just seven degrees. It was natural, then, for astronomers to expect that planets orbiting other stars would behave the same way... But in recent years, new observations have revealed that the story is somewhat more complicated, at least for the oddest planets known, the Hot Jupiters. ... Comparable in mass to Jupiter, they move on incredibly short period orbits, almost skimming the surfaces of their host...