Daniel Hey

The night sky looks still, but many stars tremble like a drum after a strike. For seven straight years, the TESS satellite stared at the same patches of sky and caught this trembling in 19,151 red giants — old, bloated stars. Previously, far fewer of these 'singing' giants were known, and now the list has grown by 80%.

A cosmic sprinter on a short track: that's how you might describe planet GJ 367 b. It whips around its star in just 7.7 hours. This world is slightly smaller than Earth but has a personality: it was once thought to be nearly a solid ball of iron.

Every night the Kepler telescope stared at the same patch of sky, catching tiny dips in the light of distant stars. If a star blinked with clockwork precision, that could mean a planet was passing in front of it. But sometimes the blinking turned out to be a trick: light from two stars got mixed together, and astronomers filed the signal away in the false-alarm archive.