Pía Cortés-Zuleta

The young star TOI-451 wobbles slightly as three planets circle it. Each wobble is like the tremor of a spiderweb when a tiny spider crawls across it. Astronomers caught this tremor to learn how heavy the planets are. They watched the star for several months using telescopes on Earth. The planets kept passing in front of the star, briefly dimming its light.

A star wrapped in an invisible blanket warms up more than it should. That's exactly how ten red dwarfs look, which astronomers from the Hephaistos project have been monitoring. These stars lie within 300 parsecs (about 1000 light-years) of us and emit far more infrared energy than their modest sizes can explain.