A planet circling at a sharp 90-degree angle to the orbits of its two host stars has now been confirmed. This discovery challenges long-standing ideas about how planets form and orbit in the cosmos.

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 ...

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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 ...

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 ...

Planet hunters have grown used to strange worlds, but a handful of discoveries now point to something even more radical: giant planets that loop around their stars on orbits so skewed they almost defy ...

Luke found life on Tatooine to be boring, but he should be glad, because as we have seen, binary stars have the potential to play all kinds of havoc on their orbiting circumbinary planets. When you ...

A new study has strengthened the statistical case for the existence of Planet 9, a hypothesised giant world far beyond Neptune. By analysing the orbits of distant solar system objects, researchers ...