Exoplanets

TESS has one job, and for eight years it has done it well: stare at stars and wait for a planet to cross in front of one, dimming its light by a fraction of a percent. That method, the transit, has a…

Every 34 hours, a giant planet slips across the face of a dead star. The star is WD 1856+534, a white dwarf no bigger than Earth. It is the smoldering core left behind after a Sun-like star exhausted…

Beta Pictoris has been the poster child of exoplanet astronomy since before most exoplanets could be seen at all. In 1984 it gave astronomers their first image of a dusty disk around another star,…

Few stars have carried as much baggage as KIC 8462852. Better known as Tabby's star, after astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, it made headlines in 2015 for dimming in ways no ordinary planet could produce:…