Lisa Dang

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.

Planet WASP-121b orbits so near its star that the fierce heat boils its atmosphere away, streaming like a comet's tails. With the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers continuously watched this process for the first time.

Planet WASP-121 b always shows the same face to its star, like a rock in a campfire. The dayside is so hot that ordinary hydrogen, the very stuff most of the universe is made of, can't take it: its molecules tear apart into individual atoms, and the temperature flips upside down: the higher you go, the hotter it gets.

Red dwarfs are tireless blacksmiths of planetary fate. Their radiation, like a hammer, beats off gas envelopes, leaving only naked rocky cores. In the depths of the constellation Hercules, around the dim M-dwarf GJ 3929, orbits a world one-and-a-half times Earth's size, like a billet on an anvil.