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, ...

A newly discovered object orbiting far beyond Neptune has its closest approach to the Sun pointed in the opposite direction from every other known body like it, weakening one of the central ...

Giant mirrors in space have been a staple of science fiction for decades. But so far, there's been very little work looking ...

In theory, it could happen – one of the very first solutions to the three-body problem was this scenario. But it is very unlikely to be stable over time. You need the stars to have near equal mass and ...

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 ...

As planetary systems evolve, gravitational interactions between planets can fling some of them into eccentric elliptical orbits around the host star, or even out of the system altogether. Smaller ...