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 shape of a planet's orbit is one of its fundamental properties, along with its size and distance from its host star. Earth has a nearly circular orbit, but some planets outside our solar system, ...

Researchers used a pair of powerful supercomputers to simulate the potential trajectories of 1 million satellites in a ...

Scientists have used data from NASA's retired planet-hunting space telescope 'Kepler' to discover that small and large worlds have very different upbringings. The team found that larger planets on non ...

General relativity helps explain the lack of planets around tight binary stars by driving orbital resonances that eject or destroy close-in worlds. This process naturally creates a “desert” of ...

The classical picture of star and planet formation suggests that a star’s rotational axis and the orbital planes of its planets should be aligned. However, exoplanetary systems have considerable ...

Scientists have been trying to find a hypothetical Planet 9 that may exist outside our known solar system based on the unusual orbits of certain dwarf planets. But those orbits might not require a ...