Pluto's unusual eccentricity and tilt is likely due to its interactions with neighboring Neptune and other giant planets, said Renu Malhotra, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona who has ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

"This is really like looking at ourselves in a funhouse mirror." When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Skewed planetary pathways around ...

The Sun is an incandescent but benevolent dictator. For billions of years, it’s kept our star system well organized through the influence of its powerful gravity. All the planets revolve around it on ...

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One hundred light years away, a handful of planets are circling a star in the same configuration as when they formed. By Katrina Miller Astronomers have discovered six planets orbiting a bright star ...