People of every culture have been fascinated by the dark “spots” on the Moon, which seem to compose the figure of a rabbit, frogs or the face of a clown. With the Apollo missions, scientists found ...

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, ...

The planets of our solar system all orbit the Sun within a few degrees of a flat plane extending out from our star’s equator — its equatorial plane. That makes sense. Our solar system began as a ...

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 ...

UCLA astrophysicists have now measured the shape of the orbits of exoplanets—from the size of Jupiter down to the size of ...