When most of us were growing up, the solar system seemed reliable and well behaved. “There were nine planets orbiting in well-determined orbits like clockwork, forever,” says Renu Malhotra of ...

Astronomers have sent artificial satellites (satellites that are manmade) to orbit several Solar System objects, including Jupiter, the asteroid Vesta and Mars. Polar orbits take the satellites ...

Mercury orbits once every 88 Earth days, but Neptune orbits once every 165 Earth years For a planet to form, its own gravity must be strong enough to make it round or spherical in shape.

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 ...

Ever since Isaac Newton famously talked about gravity, its dominance as a force in our solar system has been well known. It's ...

An object eight times the mass of Jupiter may have swooped around the sun, coming superclose to Mars' present-day orbit ...

Since the formation of the Solar System, the orbits of the planets have evolved and changed over time. While one of the most prominent ideas in the last few decades is planetary migrations and the ...

Despite common assumptions, the disk of our Solar System is warped, and the planets travel around the Sun in slightly eccentric (or oblong) orbits. Scientists now think that a mysterious object ...

with highly “tilted” orbits compared to the ecliptic plane. This seemed odd and illogical as when the Solar system formed, it would be expected that objects that developed in the circumstellar ...

“We predict the existence of an Earth-like planet and several TNOs on peculiar orbits in the outer solar system,” write the authors, Patryk Sofia Lykawka of Kindai University, Japan and ...