Astronomers have made a groundbreaking discovery of three Earth-sized planets orbiting within a compact binary star system. This rare configuration, where planets circle two stars simultaneously, ...
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 ...
The coincidence of trends in abundance, metallicity and eccentricity points to two distinct pathways for forming small and large planets. "To see a transition in the eccentricities of the orbits at ...
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 ...