Yifan Zhou

Far beyond the Solar System, a world called VHS 1256B wanders — a giant planet without a star. For a long time, astronomers couldn’t figure out why its brightness jumped by nearly 40% in just a few days. The answer came with the James Webb telescope: it turns out, colossal storms of silicate dust engulf the entire planet.

A giant baby planet is still pulling in leftover building material from its surrounding cloud. That's the scene the Hubble Space Telescope captured when it aimed its cameras at an object catalogued as SR 12 c. This companion planet orbits a young star at a wide distance — farther out than Neptune is from the Sun.

The James Webb Space Telescope has peered into a strange binary world. Here, a dead star, a white dwarf, slowly roasts its companion, a brown dwarf. The object, named ZTFJ0038+2030, completes a full orbit in just a few hours. One side of the brown dwarf always faces the white dwarf, much like the Moon faces Earth.

2,41 hours. That's exactly how long a day lasts on SIMP 0136 — a lonely planet-like object 6,1 parsecs away. That's twice as far as Proxima Centauri. Its mass ranges from 12,7 to 17,8 Jupiter masses, placing it on the boundary between planet and star.