Before we dive in, let’s do a quick review to appreciate what it actually means for an object to be in orbit. As Isaac Newton’s famous first law of motion states, an object in motion will stay in ...

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 ...

UCLA astrophysicists have now measured the shape of the orbits of exoplanets—from the size of Jupiter down to the size of ...

A novel type of multiple-apogee highly elliptical orbits termed as MAP HEO with a period of rotation between 14 h and 15 h is introduced. These orbits are designed to achieve continuous geostationary ...

A study of one galaxy's dynamics backs up previous claims that surprisingly compact galaxies existed in the early Universe. But how such objects blew up in size to form present-day galaxies remains a ...

Ever since the 16th century when Nicolaus Copernicus demonstrated that the Earth revolved around in the Sun, scientists have worked tirelessly to understand the relationship in mathematical terms. If ...

Quick: How many moons does the Earth have? You might be forgiven for saying “one,” but it turns out the question isn’t all that easy to answer … because it depends on what you mean by “moon.” Of ...

Cometary orbits exhibit a wide range of shapes and eccentricities, not all being highly elliptical. Comets originating from the Oort Cloud possess highly eccentric elliptical orbits, subject to ...

Large and small planets are born from very different circumstances, according to data from NASA's now-retired space telescope Kepler. It found that larger planets with non-circular orbits are more ...

Astronomers at The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory, along with colleagues at Caltech and elsewhere, have discovered a planet three times the mass of Jupiter that travels on a long ...