As planetary systems evolve, gravitational interactions between planets can fling some of them into eccentric elliptical orbits around the host star, or even out of the system altogether. Smaller ...

An illustration of the solar system and the planet's orbits around the sun When you're standing on Earth's surface, it's easy to forget that our planet is hurtling around the sun at more than 67,000 ...

A recent massive stellar explosion has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of how such cosmic events impact planetary ...

For the inner four planets in this solar system, each planet orbits the sun three times for every two orbits of the planet immediately to its outside. For the fourth, fifth and sixth planets, they ...

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 ...

Planets orbit their parent stars while separated by enormous distances – in our solar system, planets are like grains of sand in a region the size of a football field. The time that planets take to ...

An interstellar visitor may have warped the solar system billions of years ago, a new study has claimed. Scientists suggested ...

These six planets are in perfect sync with each other as they dance through space around their star. Credit: Roger Thibaut (NCCR PlanetS) Astronomers have observed a solar system where six planets are ...

Luke found life on Tatooine to be boring, but he should be glad, because as we have seen, binary stars have the potential to play all kinds of havoc on their orbiting circumbinary planets. A ...

Each pair of planets completes their orbits in times that are the ratios of whole numbers, allowing the planets to align and exert a gravitational push and pull on the other during their orbit. This ...