UCLA astrophysicists have now measured the shape of the orbits of exoplanets—from the size of Jupiter down to the size of Mars—and shown that small planets have nearly circular orbits, while giant ...

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 ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. An artist's depiction of a hot Jupiter planet orbiting its star. Skewed planetary pathways around a star aren't so strange after ...

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 ...

Planet hunters have grown used to strange worlds, but a handful of discoveries now point to something even more radical: giant planets that loop around their stars on orbits so skewed they almost defy ...

The classical picture of star and planet formation suggests that a star’s rotational axis and the orbital planes of its planets should be aligned. However, exoplanetary systems have considerable ...

In the cold, dark outskirts of planetary systems far beyond the reach of the known planets, mysterious gas giants and planetary masses silently orbit their stars—sometimes thousands of astronomical ...