EVANSTON, Ill. — Except for the fact that we call it home, for centuries astronomers didn’t have any particular reason to believe that our solar system was anything special in the universe. 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 ...

The orbits of a seven-planet system discovered in Kepler Space Telescope data has been sonified. Credit: Bishop’s University ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. An illustration showing Planet Nine, a hypothetical, undiscovered planet in our solar system. New research now suggests the ...

If you cast your eyes toward the constellation Cygnus, you’ll be looking in the direction of the largest planet yet discovered around a double-star system. It’s too faint to see with the naked eye, ...

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 ...

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Astronomers have ...

Earth-like planets on non-Earth-like orbits might be just as likely as Earth to harbor life—maybe even more likely. Given the abundance of non-circular orbits among exoplanets—with half of all gas ...

Sixty-six light-years away, an Earth-sized exoplanet completes an orbit in under six hours, skimming around its star at nearly one-hundredth the distance that Mercury orbits the Sun. This planet is on ...