R. Doyon

The red dwarf Gliese 725 B lies just 3.5 light-years away — by cosmic standards, a neighbor next door. Such stars are small and dim, so planets around them are easier to spot: the star wobbles more noticeably under their gravitational pull. But Earth's own atmosphere gets in the way of detecting that wobble.

Every 3.97 days, the disk of the star TOI-1080 dims slightly. The shadow lasts a few hours — a planet passing in front of its star, like a fly in front of a lamp. Such 'eclipses' are caught by the TESS space telescope, which watches thousands of stars at once.