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, ...

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 ...

Diagram of discovered exoplanet orbits. The orbits of exoplanets close to their parent stars tend to become circular over time, but three of the newly discovered exoplanets, except the bottom left, ...

It's 2015. You're NASA's chief engineer designing a moonbase for Shackleton Crater at the Moon's south pole. You're also designing a com-system that will allow astronauts constant radio contact with ...

As planetary systems evolve, gravitational interactions between planets can fling some of them into eccentric elliptical orbits around the host star. Smaller planets should be more susceptible to this ...

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, ...

All objects with mass pull things towards their center, that pull is called gravity. The more massive an object is, the more its gravity “pulls” on other objects nearby. In space, the gravitational ...