David K. Sing

The planet WASP-121 b is a gas giant, heated to 2500°C. It always faces its star with one side, like a globe frozen under a lamp. But as it passes in front of the star's disk, its rotation reveals different facets to us — as if that globe were slowly turned, letting us peer into every corner.

When a Sun-like star sheds its shells and contracts into a white dwarf, its system sinks into a prolonged twilight. Outer worlds drift away, inner ones evaporate — giant planets, it seemed, were doomed to eternal cold in interstellar emptiness.

When a star dies, it turns into a white dwarf — a dense ball of carbon and oxygen the size of Earth. Predicted by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, these objects were long thought to be lifeless graveyards.