Viewed from above, our solar system's planetary orbits around the sun resemble rings around a bulls-eye. Each planet, including Earth, keeps to a roughly circular path, always maintaining the same ...

Researchers based at Aarhus University measured the orbital eccentricity of 74 small extrasolar planets and found their orbits to be close to circular, similar to the planets in the solar system, but ...

Hot Jupiters rank among the strangest planets astronomers have ever found. They are gas giants as massive as Jupiter, yet ...

The first planet ever found orbiting another star was detected in 1995, and it belonged to a class now known as a “hot Jupiter.” These exoplanets are comparable in mass to Jupiter but circle their ...

The first exoplanet ever discovered in 1995 was what we now call a "hot Jupiter," a planet as massive as Jupiter with an ...

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 ...

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 ...

Astronomers reveal some hot Jupiters formed via smooth disk migration. Circular orbits and aligned companions challenge traditional theories, offering new insights into exoplanetary system evolution.

The planets of our solar system move in ellipses. We've known this, so we are told, ever since Johannes Kepler devised his laws of planetary motion in the early 1600s. While it's true that orbits are ...

Hot Jupiters, the blisteringly close cousins of our own Jupiter, were once treated as cosmic misfits. Now their orbital patterns are turning into a kind of forensic record, revealing how these giants ...