NORFOLK, Va. — Each planet in our solar system takes a different amount of time to complete one orbit around the sun. For example, Mercury, being closest to the sun, takes just 88 Earth days to ...

When we think about orbits, we usually picture the Earth zooming around the sun. But does the sun just sit there? Or is it on its own journey? I asked my friend Guy Worthey. He’s a space scientist at ...

General relativity helps explain the lack of planets around tight binary stars by driving orbital resonances that eject or destroy close-in worlds. This process naturally creates a “desert” of ...

In order for Jupiter to crash into the Sun, something truly extraordinary would need to happen. Its orbit would need to be ...

Astronomers have long wondered why planets orbiting two stars like the iconic Tatooine in Star Wars are so rare. You would expect them to be everywhere, really. Most stars form with planets, and a ...

Hiding just six light-years away from our solar system, an exoplanet has been revealed to be orbiting the closest single star to Earth. The world—dubbed Barnard b—is thought to have about half of the ...

This image from a simulation of atmospheric flow shows temperature patterns on one of the newly discovered planets (61Virb), which is hot enough that it glows with its own thermal emission. A movie of ...