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 ...

Key science: Stellar dynamics, N-body simulations, planetary orbital stability, and galactic gravitational potentials.

For centuries, astronomers have sought to understand the formation and evolution of the solar system and the dynamics that govern it. In particular, there is the long-standing question of whether or ...

Astronomers could multiply the known catalog of planets outside our solar system by a factor of roughly 16 in a single ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...