Johanna K. Teske

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.

Jupiter is a colossal ball of gas that sits five times farther from the Sun than Earth. Now imagine a similar ball, but around another star, at a distance tens of times greater. These are called cold Jupiters, and they remain a puzzle: how did they get there? Astronomers studied four such planets around distant stars.

The TESS telescope photographed the sky for a full year, but its standard pipeline skipped over dim stars. The T16 project took the same images and cleaned them from scratch — resulting in 83,717,159 light curves, like EKGs for every star. Planets passing in front of their star briefly dim it, and these dips in the EKGs are what we look for.

A ball, almost weightless for its size, circles its star every four days. Planet TOI-2195 A b is a real riddle: by mass it's slightly heavier than Neptune, yet bloated to Jovian volumes. If there were an ocean big enough, this exoplanet would float on its surface like a giant inflatable ball.