This is a brilliant question because the notion of an orbit is counterintuitive. We know that massive objects (really, any objects with mass) gravitationally attract other massive objects; Newton's ...

Forget what you learned in school. The solar system isn't just a flat disc of planets it's a 3D bubble moving through space. This video explains why all planets orbit in the same flat plane and what ...

Andrew Winter's team at Queen Mary University of London analyzed fifteen disks around young stars. They used the ALMA array to measure Doppler shifts of carbon monoxide. This technique reveals the ...

A step-by-step explanation for why planets that orbit a double star eventually enter an unstable orbit and disappear from the system. Of the more than 4,500 stars known to have planets, one puzzling ...

When you see art of our solar system as the planet orbit the sun, you may notice that Earth's orbit has a tilt. It is not a perfect circle. What's more, Earth is not the only planet that displays such ...

General relativity helps explain the lack of planets around tight binary stars by driving orbital resonances that eject or destroy close-in worlds. This process naturally creates a “desert” of ...