A newly discovered ice comet from deep space may be over 7 billion years old, making it the most ancient comet scientists ...

Some orbits can be nearly circular, moving at a relatively constant speed, like Earth’s path around the sun. However, most orbits are at least slightly elliptical, taking oval pathways and moving at ...

To do it they had to go to a dry lakebed in Nevada, and first build a model of the inner planets to a scale of 1 astronomical unit (AU, or distance from the Sun to Earth) of 176 metres.

In this solar system, Jupiter is about the size of a miniature watermelon. The sun is a small weather balloon. And the orbits, traced onto a dry lakebed, are huge.

The strange orbits of some objects in the farthest reaches of our solar system, hypothesized by some astronomers to be shaped by an unknown ninth planet, can instead be explained by the combined ...

Neptune, the solar system's most far flung planet, orbits the sun from about 4.498 billion kilometers away. At this scale, the model is more than 11 kilometers wide.

In order to make a diagram of our solar system easy to read, one with to-scale orbits has inflated planet size. Only with a model like the one Overstreet and Alex Gorosh created can you see just ...

In a 2009 paper in the journal Nature, Laskar and co-author Mickael Gastineau ran numerical models of some 2500 orbits using current knowledge of our solar system’s initial orbital parameters.

But there's a problem with just going ahead and assuming that the Earth orbits the sun. For a long time, humans believed in a different model of the solar system: the geocentric, or Earth-centered ...

The Solar System’s current planetary orbits seem stable, but that’s only because the planets have settled into them over billions of years.The early Solar System was a much different place ...

A seismic shift occurred in astronomy during the Scientific Revolution, beginning with 16th-century polymath Copernicus and his proposal that the Earth revolved around the sun. By the 17th century, ...

In young solar systems emerging around baby stars, some orbits are more popular than others, resulting in ‘planet pile-ups’ and ‘planet deserts’ Computer simulations have revealed a ...