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 ...

Moons orbiting rogue planets, worlds flung from their parent star systems into the cold of interstellar space, could maintain ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...