Southwest Research Institute scientists propose a new model for the formation of compact exoplanetary systems that contain multiple rocky planets in tight orbits around their star. In this model, ...

Outer space never fails to remind us just how much we don't know. Astronomers have uncovered a lemon-shaped planet that ...

Planets orbit their parent stars while separated by enormous distances – in our solar system, planets are like grains of sand in a region the size of a football field. The time that planets take to ...

Planets orbiting two stars at once, a world that sparked debate over the possibility of life, and another being vaporized by ...

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 ...

Our sun is about halfway through its life, which means Earth is as well. After a star exhausts its hydrogen nuclear fuel, its ...

As planetary systems evolve, gravitational interactions between planets can fling some of them into eccentric elliptical orbits around the host star, or even out of the system altogether. Smaller ...

EVANSTON, Ill. — Except for the fact that we call it home, for centuries astronomers didn’t have any particular reason to believe that our solar system was anything special in the universe. But, ...

Planet hunters have grown used to strange worlds, but a handful of discoveries now point to something even more radical: giant planets that loop around their stars on orbits so skewed they almost defy ...

An illustration of the solar system and the planet's orbits around the sun When you're standing on Earth's surface, it's easy to forget that our planet is hurtling around the sun at more than 67,000 ...

Theorbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune may have been altered by the fly-by of an enormous object from deep space, billions of years ago. According to a pre-print research paper, which is yet ...

We worked out how many trips each of the solar system's eight planets has taken around the sun over the past 4.6 billion years. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate ...