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The spectra had been sitting in a public archive for years, taken for someone else's project, a planet hunt at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. On night after night in the spring of 2018…
Stand on the daylit side of TOI-561 b and there would be nothing underfoot but rock hot enough to run like water. It is a rocky planet a little larger than Earth, orbiting so close to its star that a…
In 1995, two Swiss astronomers watched a star named 51 Pegasi lurch toward and away from Earth on a four-day beat, and read in that tiny rhythm the presence of an unseen planet. The wobble was the…
In March 1974, as Mariner 10 swept past Mercury for the first time, its instruments recorded something nobody had ordered: bursts of energetic electrons, arriving in gusts, around a planet that had…
For years, the search for atmospheres on rocky exoplanets has mostly returned bad news. The small worlds that orbit red dwarfs sit close to stars that flare hard and blast them with radiation, and…
For decades, every thermometer pointed at Io read the same thing: its skin. Infrared cameras aboard Galileo, and more recently Juno's own JIRAM instrument, catch the glow of the surface and the lava…
A comet is, in the most literal sense, a piece of frozen memory. The ice that makes up its body records the temperature, the chemistry, and the company it kept when it first congealed out of a cloud…
Somewhere in the galaxy, particles get flung to energies that dwarf anything a human-built collider can reach. Astronomers call the engines behind them PeVatrons, sources able to accelerate cosmic…
Chemists have a name for the kind of molecule they had never quite caught in space: a true sugar, a carbohydrate with the right skeleton to slot into the chemistry of living things. Simpler…
In the year 1181, astronomers in China and Japan noted a new star in the sky, a "guest star" that lingered for months before fading. Eight and a half centuries later, that entry in the historical…
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…