The first planet ever found orbiting another star was detected in 1995, and it belonged to a class now known as a “hot Jupiter.” These exoplanets are comparable in mass to Jupiter but circle their ...

Hot Jupiters, giant planets that circle their stars in just a few days, have long defied simple explanations of how planetary ...

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 ...

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 ...

Strange giant planets known as hot Jupiters, which orbit close to their suns, got kicked onto their peculiar paths by nearby planets and stars, a new study finds. After analyzing the orbits of dozens ...

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 ...

Astronomers reveal some hot Jupiters formed via smooth disk migration. Circular orbits and aligned companions challenge traditional theories, offering new insights into exoplanetary system evolution.

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 ...

The term "perihelion" describes the point in an astronomical body's orbit where it is nearest to the sun. Derived from the ...