The lover and the beloved, by Jesse Mockrin, whose exhibition The Venus Effect was on view in October at James Cohan Gallery, in New York City © The artist. Courtesy the artist; James Cohan, New York City; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles

Astronomers discovered a large planet that orbits an improbably small star every 3.7 days. A hyperbolic meteor from the Oort Cloud that may have undergone gravitational perturbation in its passage through Scholz’s binary star system eighty thousand years ago was detected by the Finnish Fireball Network, and many comets from the cloud were found farther…