Star spots are cooler regions of a star’s surface, caused by magnetic activity, and emit less light. If a planet transits across a spot it blocks less light, and so we see a slight rise, a bump, in the transit profile.

On the left (in blue) is a transit from a new paper by Espinoza et al, who have observed transits of WASP-19b with the Magellan telescope. A clear bump is seen, indicating that the planet passed over a cooler spot.

On the right (in red), however, is another transit showing a clear dip compared to the expected transit lightcurve. This implies that during this transit the planet passed over a brighter region on the star. This is the first time such an event has been seen.

The authors deduce that the bright spot must have a size of about a quarter of the stellar radius and must be 100 K hotter than the rest of the star. Such regions are not seen on our own Sun.

The main point of the observations, however, was not studying spots but studying the planet’s atmosphere by recording how the transit depth changes with wavelength. Here is the state-of-play for the spectrum of WASP-19b, covering optical to infra-red wavelengths:

The red data-points are from the Hubble Space Telescope, showing a spectral feature, but the new data by Espinoza et al (white points) are consistent with a flat spectrum within the limits of the data.