OK so we've sent probes past Pluto, we've landed on a comet, we have a helicopter on Mars, and yet our own solar system is still full of stuff that makes scientists go "...huh." There's a new roundup over on MSN with ten of these mysteries and I read the whole thing with my jaw slightly open.

Like. We live here. This is our neighborhood. And half of it still won't explain itself.

Some highlights from the list: Uranus is tilted almost completely on its side, like 98 degrees, rolling around the sun like a bowling ball, and nobody knows for sure what knocked it over. The leading theory is a massive collision but we've never found the smoking gun. Then there's the fact that the sun's corona, its outer atmosphere, is somehow hundreds of times hotter than its surface, which would be like standing next to a campfire with your eyebrows staying cool while the air ten feet away burns. That one has been bugging physicists for decades.

Venus rotates backwards. It just spins the wrong direction compared to everything else, and there are theories but no clean answer. Saturn's rings might be surprisingly young on cosmic timescales, and nobody knows if they're temporary or if we just caught them at a lucky moment.

And of course there's the whole "where did the water on Earth come from" thing, plus the ongoing hunt for Planet Nine, a hypothetical world hiding way out in the dark past Neptune that we've inferred from the weird clustering of small objects but never actually seen. There could be a whole planet out there. Unseen. Right now.

I love this stuff so much. Not because I want the mysteries to stay unsolved, although obviously please solve them, but because it's a good reminder that "unexplained" doesn't mean "unexplainable." Every one of these is just a puzzle sitting there waiting for the right person with the right telescope and the right Tuesday afternoon. Some of them will crack in our lifetime.

My favorite flavor of this is the same one I wrote about with the Taos Hum, that feeling of something enormous and real and humming right there, refusing to hand over its reasons. The universe gets to keep a few secrets. It's allowed.

But seriously, Planet Nine. If you're out there, show yourself. We just want to talk.