One of my favorite aspects about the vast number of exoplanets detected so far coming up on 5,000 of these alien worlds is that with so many discovered, you can see trends in their characteristics, as well as find oddballs that fall far from the trends.
In our solar system, for example, the planets are well-spaced and have fairly circular orbits. But that's not always the case.
"Delay is the deadliest form of denial." -C. Northcote Parkinson
Every massless particle and wave travels at the speed of light when it moves through a vacuum. Over a distance of 130 million light years, the gamma rays and gravitational waves emitted by merging neutron stars arrived offset by a mere 1.7 seconds, an incredible result! Yet if the light was emitted at the same time as the merger, that 1.7 second delay shouldn’t be there, unless something funny is afoot.
Astronomers have found an exoplanet that is so close to its host star that its "year," the time it takes to orbit the star once, is a mere 16 hours! It's so close in that it's the second-hottest exoplanet ever found (after KELT-9b), and the shortest orbit ever seen for a gas giant.
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