Tristan Guillot

A family moves into a cramped apartment in the city center. If the move was calm, relatives might have moved in with them. But if the family was evicted from their old home by a storm, they'll end up alone in the new place.

NASA's TESS space telescope monitors thousands of stars, catching the moment when a planet crosses its star's disk — the star's light dims slightly. That's how astronomers spotted two planets orbiting stars similar to our Sun. One, TOI-883 b, completes an orbit in ten days; the other, TOI-899 b, takes nearly thirteen.

Steam over a boiling pot slightly tints the light of a flashlight: it blocks some colors and lets others through. That's roughly how we study the air of distant planets.

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.