Using advanced new simulations, a team of astronomers in the U.S. has developed a promising new theory for how giant, gaseous ...

Viewed from above, our solar system's planetary orbits around the sun resemble rings around a bulls-eye. Each planet, including Earth, keeps to a roughly circular path, always maintaining the same ...

Researchers based at Aarhus University measured the orbital eccentricity of 74 small extrasolar planets and found their orbits to be close to circular, similar to the planets in the solar system, but ...

Viewed from above, our solar system's planetary orbits around the sun resemble rings around a bulls-eye. Each planet, including Earth, keeps to a roughly circular path, always maintaining the same ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

Of all the planets in the solar system, Earth is distinctly hospitable to life because of its distance from the sun. As our planet follows its orbit, it gets sufficiently close to the sun as to take ...

Orbits of 74 small extrasolar planets are found to be close to circular, in contrast to previous measurements of massive exoplanets. The results, to be published in the Astrophysical Journal are ...