In 1917, astronomer Walter Sydney Adams noted a strange smudge in a white dwarf spectrum at Mount Wilson and filed the glass plate away. Ninety-nine years later, scientists realized it was the pulverized remains of an exoplanet being consumed by its star. This deep dive follows the long road from that overlooked plate through a century of false starts, including William Stephen Jacob's 1855 claim, Peter van de Kamp's phantom planets around Barnard's Star, and Andrew Lyne's embarrassing 1991 pulsar retraction, to the first confirmed detections in 1992 around pulsar PSR B1257+12 and the Nobel-winning 1995 discovery at 51 Pegasi.

The episode explains how astronomers actually find these worlds: the transit method behind Kepler and TESS, the radial velocity method sensitive to stellar wobbles slower than a walking human, and the coronagraph-assi ...