Merging black holes and neutron stars have unusual oval orbits prior to colliding and merging, which challenge the laws of ...

In 2020, astronomers discovered a violent cosmic event that has led them to rethink how extreme pairs of astronomical objects form. These pairs are capable of producing powerful cosmic collisions.

A fresh analysis of gravitational wave data from a 2020 collision between a black hole and a neutron star has produced the first measured evidence of an eccentric, oval-shaped orbit in this type of ...

The catastrophic collision of a black hole and a neutron star sent ripples across the universe. New analysis of those ripples could upend a major theory about how these extreme pairs form.

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 ...

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 ...

The eight planets in our solar system (yes, it's still weird for me to write "eight," too) orbit the sun in roughly circular paths, although they're ever-so-slightly ellipses instead of circles. A new ...

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 ...

EVANSTON, Ill. — Except for the fact that we call it home, for centuries astronomers didn’t have any particular reason to believe that our solar system was anything special in the universe. But, ...