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 ...

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 ...

A team of researchersfrom MIT and Aarhus University, Denmark, have discovered thatEarth-sized exoplanets orbit their parent stars in the same way thatour planet orbits our own Sun – maintaining a ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Though wildly different in so many ways, Earth and Saturn's moon Titan have something important in common. Among all the objects in the solar system, they're the only two with liquids on their ...

There is another possible pattern in Fig. 2a. Objects in the red group appear redder with smaller perihelion distance. Perhaps we are seeing the effect of an increase of solar radiation modifying the ...