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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The movement of Mercury in the opposite direction is exclusively an optical illusion, which is caused by the different speeds of the planets in their orbits, and does not have a negative impact on ...