A seismic shift occurred in astronomy during the Scientific Revolution, beginning with 16th-century polymath Copernicus and his proposal that the Earth revolved around the sun. By the 17th century, ...

A newly discovered object orbiting far beyond Neptune has its closest approach to the Sun pointed in the opposite direction from every other known body like it, weakening one of the central ...

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 giant planets weren't always where we find them today. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune formed in a more compact configuration and later underwent a violent reshuffling that scattered them to ...

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 ...

Astronomers could multiply the known catalog of planets outside our solar system by a factor of roughly 16 in a single ...

In theory, it could happen – one of the very first solutions to the three-body problem was this scenario. But it is very unlikely to be stable over time. You need the stars to have near equal mass and ...