A. Sozzetti

A quiet flute melody gets lost in the roar of drums. That's what astronomers face when trying to catch the faint light that has passed through a distant planet's atmosphere while its star blazes nearby. A team of scientists observed WASP-31 b — a hot Jupiter, a gas giant orbiting very close to its star.

The carousel spins all the horses in one direction, but one stubbornly gallops against the flow. That's exactly how the planet TOI-1710 b behaves around its star. Using the HARPS-N and GIANO-B instruments, astronomers measured its tilt at 149 degrees. That's nearly a 180-degree flip, meaning the planet orbits "backward" relative to the star's rotation.

Light from a distant star seeps through a planet's gaseous envelope, and astronomers try to guess what that envelope is made of. That's how we study the atmospheres of worlds we can never touch. When a planet passes in front of its sun's disk, its gaseous veil briefly intercepts some of the rays.

A streetlamp flickers as someone walks past. That's roughly how our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, behaves: it flares in response to the motion of its planets. Astronomers observed the star with a highly sensitive instrument, the ESPRESSO spectrograph. It captures light and splits it into colors, much like a prism.