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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. When Johannes Kepler made the intuitive leap in the early 1600s to realize that planetary orbits ...