An object eight times the mass of Jupiter may have swooped around the sun, coming superclose to Mars' present-day orbit before shoving four of the solar system's planets onto a different course.

Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists are studying Saturn's moon Titan to assess its tidal dissipation rate, the ...

When you first learned about the Solar System, you probably saw diagrams that made it look orderly, with planets arranged in circular orbits around the Sun on a flat disk. But in reality, our Solar ...

However, it was not until Kepler's observations that the planets followed elliptical orbits around the sun (rather than circular orbits) that astronomical models matched observations of the ...

Orbits of natural bodies in the universe are usually not perfectly circular — they are elliptical. Some orbits are ever so slightly elliptical (like a somewhat squashed circle, or, in ...

five or size planets per star ranging in mass between three times that of Earth all the way up to brown dwarfs around 500 solar-like stars in circular planar orbits between out to 400 Earth-Sun ...

An object moving in a circular orbit at a constant speed has a changing velocity. This is because velocity is a vector quantity that depends on speed and direction. The object in orbit is ...

This may explain the strange properties of the orbits of our solar system's planets, which are not quite perfectly circular, and all lie on slightly different planes. NASA artist’s conception of ...

Satellites in geostationary orbits are used for communications and satellite television. For an object to remain in a steady, circular orbit it must be travelling at the right speed. The diagram ...

However, none of the eight planets, including Earth, have perfectly circular orbits. Plus, the planets' paths don't lie precisely on the same plane. "[T]he puzzle for theoretical astrophysics has ...