Calling all stargazers: Oregon is now home to the largest Dark Sky Sanctuary in the world.

Earlier this month, DarkSky International certified a remote, 2.5 million-acre area in the southeastern part of the state. From this rugged swath of high desert landscape dotted with sagebrush, visitors who stay up late can see large numbers of stars, planets and other celestial bodies.

“It’s surprising sometimes to see that many stars all at once,” says Bob Hackett, executive director of Travel Southern Oregon, to the Guardian’s Dani Anguiano. “It catches you, and it makes you pause because you feel like you can touch it … That vastness of the whole cosmos up there—it almost makes you get closer to the people you’re with on the ground.”

The study of “exoplanets,” the sci-fi-sounding name for all planets in the cosmos beyond our own solar system, is a pretty new field. Mainly, exoplanet researchers like those in the ExoLab at the University of Kansas use data from space-borne telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope and Webb Space Telescope. Whenever news headlines offer findings of “Earth-like” planets or planets with the potential to support humanity, they’re talking about exoplanets within our own Milky Way.

Jonathan Brande, a doctoral candidate in the ExoLab at the University of Kansas, has just published findings in the open-access scientific journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters showing new atmospheric detail in a set of 15 exoplanets similar to Neptune. While none could support humanity, a better understanding of their behavior might help us to understand why we don’t have a small Neptune, while most solar systems seem to feature a planet of this class.

“Over the past several years at KU, my focus has been studying the atmospheres of exoplanets through a technique known as transmission spectroscopy,” Brande said. “When a planet transits, meaning it moves between our line of sight and the star it orbits, light from the star passes through the planet’s atmosphere, getting absorbed by the various gases present. By capturing a spectrum of the star — passing the light through an instrument called a spectrograph, akin to passing it through a prism — we observe a rainbow, measuring the brightness of different constituent colors. Varied areas of brightness or dimness in the spectrum reveal the gases absorbing light in the planet’s atmosphere.”

The Einasto Supercluster is so vast that it would take a light signal 360 million years to get from one end to the other.

As we speak, the comet 12P/Pons-Brooks (Pons-Brooks, for short) is making its way around the inner region of the Solar System for the first time in more than 70 years – and might soon become visible to the naked eye.

At approximately 30 kilometres (19 miles) across, this giant icy lump is comparable in size to Mount Everest, says astrophysicist Dr Paul Strøm, and is “one of the brightest known periodic comets”

A Halley-type comet, Pons-Brooks completes its journey around the Sun every 71.3 years and was last spotted in our skies in 1954.

As the solar system’s planets rove around the sun, sometimes a few will appear to line up in the sky. But have all eight planets ever truly aligned?

The answer depends on how generous you are with the definition of “align” for the solar system’s planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.