Steven Giacalone

Two planets around the star TOI-4495 perform a stumbling dance: while the inner one completes two laps, the outer manages just one. But the rhythm is off — the inner planet speeds up and slows down, like a partner stumbling in her steps. Using the transit method, watching as the planets briefly dim the star's light, astronomers weighed these worlds.

Every night the Kepler telescope stared at the same patch of sky, catching tiny dips in the light of distant stars. If a star blinked with clockwork precision, that could mean a planet was passing in front of it. But sometimes the blinking turned out to be a trick: light from two stars got mixed together, and astronomers filed the signal away in the false-alarm archive.