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 ...

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 ...

An international team of astronomers has discovered eight new extrasolar planets, bringing to nearly 80 the number of planets found orbiting nearby stars. The latest discoveries, supported by the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

If intelligent life is out there, it probably resides in a solar system with many planets. The more planets a star has, a recent study found, the more circular the orbits tend to be. Because planets ...

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 ...