When the solar system was first organizing itself, a disk of gas and dust took shape around the sun's central mass. It eventually sorted itself into the system of planets we see today. But there are ...

EVANSTON, Ill. — Except for the fact that we call it home, for centuries astronomers didn’t have any particular reason to believe that our solar system was anything special in the universe. But, ...

In the remote outer reaches of planetary systems, far beyond the orbit of known planets, enormous and mysterious worlds silently loop around their stars. Some drift as far as 10,000 times the distance ...

Planets orbit their parent stars while separated by enormous distances – in our solar system, planets are like grains of sand in a region the size of a football field. The time that planets take to ...

For the inner four planets in this solar system, each planet orbits the sun three times for every two orbits of the planet immediately to its outside. For the fourth, fifth and sixth planets, they ...

Across the Milky Way and beyond, planetary systems appear to fall into a few recurring blueprints, and recent exoplanet surveys suggest that just four layouts may dominate the universe. Drawing on ...

Astronomers hunting for planets orbiting nearby stars similar to the Sun are looking for signs of rocky, Earth-like planets in a “habitable” zone, where conditions such as temperature and liquid water ...

Theorbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune may have been altered by the fly-by of an enormous object from deep space, billions of years ago. According to a pre-print research paper, which is yet ...

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 ...

But sometimes, their orbits display striking patterns. For example, astronomers studying six planets orbiting a star 100 light years away have just found that they orbit their star with an almost ...