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 ...

The shape of a planet's orbit is one of its fundamental properties, along with its size and distance from its host star. Earth has a nearly circular orbit, but some planets outside our solar system, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Careful reanalysis of data from more than a decade ago indicates that Saturn's biggest moon, Titan, does not have a vast ocean beneath its icy surface, as suggested previously. Instead, a journey ...

This artist concept illustrates how a massive collision of objects perhaps as large as the planet Pluto smashed together to create the dust ring around the nearby star Vega. As planetary systems ...

A: When two spiral galaxies collide, gravity is the main force that comes into play. As the galaxies approach each other, gravitational forces start to pull the stars, gas, and dust of the spiral arms ...

This week's question comes from Wilma David in Ottawa, Ontario. David asks: Given that the sun is almost perfectly spherical (not oblate), why do planets orbit the sun in an ellipse? I understand that ...

The Solar System is remarkably regular, its eight planets orbiting the Sun in the same direction in very nearly circular trajectories. Their orbits lie nearly in the same plane, which is aligned with ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. BALTIMORE - Of the morethan 130 planets found around distant stars, a large number have ...