E. Palle

A bus schedule drifts: if you don't check it, you'll miss your ride. Planets around other stars have the same problem – their crossings of the star's disk gradually shift. The ExoClock project pooled 30,000 observations from Earth and space to refine the schedule for 620 distant worlds. For 45% of the planets, transits were found to be off by hours.

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.

When a star like the Sun ages, it swells and sheds its outer layers. What remains is a small, dense white dwarf — the former core. Around it, planetary debris can remain: rocks, dust, even whole asteroids. They orbit like a carousel that's been taken apart, but the pieces are still spinning. Astronomers watched the white dwarf WD 1054-226 for six years.