How does a planet’s size influence its orbit around its parent star? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of ...

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 ...

Earth on Tuesday made its closest approach to the sun, an annual celestial event that happens to occur at the start of the new year. The planet follows an elliptical orbit around the sun, rather than ...

Earth’s annual orbit around the Sun is not always perfectly circular; instead, it displays variations in what is known as eccentricity — in which the planet’s orbit varies between a more-circular and ...