A new study suggests yet another theory for a possible extra planet in our solar system, likely of a size between Mercury and ...

Southwest Research Institute scientists propose a new model for the formation of compact exoplanetary systems that contain multiple rocky planets in tight orbits around their star. In this model, ...

A planet-sized visitor possibly visited the solar system billions of years ago and permanently changed the cosmic neighbourhood by warping the orbital path of four outer planets of the system, a new ...

If three’s a crowd, then six makes a chorus. That’s the case at least for a rare six-planet solar system whose discovery has wowed astronomers, even in an era when detecting planets around distant ...

This week's question comes from Wilma David in Ottawa, Ontario. David asks: Given that the sun is almost perfectly spherical (not oblate), why do planets orbit the sun in an ellipse? I understand that ...

Many planetary systems are born in slightly tilted protoplanetary disks, which would explain the misaligned orbits from the ...

This illustration shows an exoplanet orbiting around two brown dwarfs –– objects bigger than gas-giant planets but too small to be proper stars. ESO/M. Kornmesser Astronomers have discovered a ...

Planets with giant orbits – such as the possible ninth planet in the solar system – are not an anomaly at all, but a normal by-product of the chaotic formation phase of solar systems. At least, that ...

An interstellar visitor may have warped the solar system billions of years ago, a new study has claimed. Scientists suggested the enormous object disrupted the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and ...

But this planet orbits three times as far as Neptune from the sun and 93 times Earth's distance from the sun. Not a 'standard' way to form a planet Its birth appears to be following a different ...