Stéphane Udry

Seven hours: that's how long a year lasts on TOI-4552b. It whips around its star faster than some moons orbit Earth. The star is a dim red dwarf, four times smaller than the Sun, but the planet is so close that it receives hundreds of times more heat than we do.

In deep space, 95 parsecs from Earth, nature is assembling a planetary clock. The model HD 114082 is a prototype, only 15 million years old. Two massive pendulums — exoplanets b and c — are already swinging with periods of 225 and 314 days, but the whole mechanism is still covered in the construction dust of a debris disk.