A new study suggests that a close encounter with a massive interstellar object, possibly eight times the mass of Jupiter, may have significantly altered the orbits of the four outer planets in our ...

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 ...

HOUSTON -- June 30, 2008 -- Nearly a century after Danish physicist Niels Bohr offered his planet-like model of the hydrogen atom, a Rice University-led team of physicists has created giant, ...

Chris Impey receives funding from the National Science Foundation. Planets orbit their parent stars while separated by enormous distances – in our solar system, planets are like grains of sand in a ...

IT IS HARDLY surprising that in the 17th and 18th centuries scientists likened the movements of the solar system to the ticking of well regulated machinery. The clockwork of orreries, mechanical ...

Although the term itself immediately conjures the sort of alchemy at the heart of the best sci-fi fantasy, celestial mechanics —- the numerical nuts and bolts of how planetary bodies move, orbit and ...