Bo Peng

The super-hot super-Earth TOI-561 b completes an orbit around its star in just 10.7 hours. It is a scorched rocky sphere, so close to its star that its dayside should heat up to 2950 K, a temperature at which many minerals melt.

A distant galaxy birthing hundreds of stars should glow in oxygen. That's what astronomers thought: hot young stars heat the gas, which then emits a characteristic infrared glow at a wavelength of 63 microns. It's like steam rising from a boiling pot — a sure sign of vigorous activity.

Globular clusters, dense swarms of hundreds of thousands of stars, hide millisecond pulsars. These are dead stars spinning at breakneck speed: one rotation every few milliseconds, like a kitchen blender on max.

The JWST space telescope aimed its lens at the scorching rocky world 55 Cancri e, and spotted a dense gas envelope. But the cooler TRAPPIST-1 b, which orbits a dim red dwarf, showed no envelope: just bare rock. The picture came out upside down: hot planets hold onto atmospheres, while cooler ones lose them.