The eight planets in our solar system (yes, it's still weird for me to write "eight," too) orbit the sun in roughly circular paths, although they're ever-so-slightly ellipses instead of circles. A new ...

How does a planet’s size influence its orbit around its parent star? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of ...

Studying the orbits of thousands of exoplanets shows that large planets tend to have elliptical orbits, while smaller planets tend to have more circular orbits. This split coincides with several other ...

The planets of our solar system move in ellipses. We've known this, so we are told, ever since Johannes Kepler devised his laws of planetary motion in the early 1600s. While it's true that orbits are ...

Beginning with the discovery 10 years ago of the first extrasolar planet, evidence suggests that, as far as planetary systems go, the solar system might be pretty special. Instead of the nice circular ...

Strange giant planets known as hot Jupiters, which orbit close to their suns, got kicked onto their peculiar paths by nearby planets and stars, a new study finds. After analyzing the orbits of dozens ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. When Johannes Kepler made the intuitive leap in the early 1600s to realize that planetary orbits ...

A giant gas planet orbiting in outskirts of the solar system, 20 times as far as Neptune, meandering its way around the sun every 10,000 or 20,000 years. It's a tantalizing prospect. Planet Nine, if ...

There is another possible pattern in Fig. 2a. Objects in the red group appear redder with smaller perihelion distance. Perhaps we are seeing the effect of an increase of solar radiation modifying the ...