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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

If intelligent life is out there, it probably resides in a solar system with many planets. The more planets a star has, a recent study found, the more circular the orbits tend to be. Because planets ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...