A Gas Giant Glowing Almost as Hot as the Sun’s Surface Picture something that isn’t a star doing a star’s job: glowing white-hot, running at nearly two-thirds the temperature of the surface we see when we look at the Sun. That’s not a stellar remnant or a failed star. It’s a planet, cataloged as TOI-2109 … Read more
A Rock That Kept Five Moon-Widths of Distance the Whole Way By On September 30, 2026, at 20:54 UTC, asteroid 2018 SP2 made its closest approach to Earth, and never came closer than 1,197,443 miles (1,927,097 km). That’s 0.01288 astronomical units (an astronomical unit is the average Earth-Sun distance, about 149,597,870 km), or 5.01 lunar … Read more
A Rock as Tall as an Apartment Block, and No Photograph of It A rock roughly the height of a city apartment building slipped past Earth, and no camera anywhere caught it happening. The object is called 2019 AS2. On October 2, 2026, it passed by at roughly 1,069,000 miles (1,720,478 kilometers) out, about 4.5 … Read more
A Whole Planetary Year Fits Inside One Long-Haul Flight A whole planetary year, start to finish, fits inside a single long-haul flight. TOI-6255 b, an Earth-sized world found in 2024, closes one full lap of its star in 20,578.96 seconds. Divide that by 3,600 and the orbit comes out to 5.72 hours. Board a flight … Read more
HEADLINE: TOI-2431 b completes a full year in just 5.4 hours ARTICLE: TOI-2431 b: A Year You Could Lose on a Long-Haul Flight Board a flight from New York to London, about seven to eight hours in the air, and you will have outlasted an entire year on this planet before the drink cart even … Read more
Put eighteen Mercurys on one side of a scale and a single Earth on the other, and the two sides balance. Eighteen isn’t a number you’d guess by eye, Mercury looks like a modest, cratered little planet in any photograph, nothing about its size hints at how light it actually is. That gap only shows … Read more
A Year That’s Over Before Your Shift Ends Picture a year that starts right after you clock in and wraps up before you clock out. One complete lap around its star takes this planet only 20,388.46 seconds, five hours and forty minutes, start to finish. Spend an ordinary afternoon running errands and you could, in … Read more
A World Where the Whole Year Happens Before Lunch Clock in for a day shift, and by early afternoon a planet on the other side of the galaxy has already run through an entire year, not a season, the whole cycle, start to finish, in roughly four hours. Earth’s orbit around the Sun takes 365.25 … Read more
Put It on a Kitchen Scale Set a 2.2-pound bag of sugar (1 kg) on the counter and call it Earth. Beside it, set a small apple, about 3.8 ounces (108 g), and that’s Mars, scaled down to match. A kitchen scale reads mass, not weight: the sugar would tip the same number whether you … Read more
One Lap, One Lifetime Someone born the moment a particular point in Uranus’s orbit lines up with the Sun would be turning 84 by the time the planet swings back to that same spot. Not a metaphor, not rounded for effect: one full trip around the Sun, bookend to bookend, lasts about as long as … Read more
