Earth is on an orderly path around the sun, orbiting in nearly the same plane as our star’s equator. In 2008, however, astronomers began finding worlds in other solar systems that sail far above and below their star’s equatorial plane.
About 1000 kilometres above Earth’s surface, two old spacecraft have narrowly avoided a collision.
Alien planets that orbit especially close to their stars have a bigger chance of losing their moons, which may reduce the chances that habitable alien moons will survive for very long around those planets, a new study finds.
Planet 9 may have been part of another solar system, and our sun was powerful enough to steal it for our own.
In just two decades, we have gone from knowing one planetary system (our own) to thousands, with 3,268 exoplanets now known. Many of which have had very irregular orbits that position themselves too close to the stars.
It’s the first in nearly 10 years, and there are only two more transits in the next couple of decades.
“As the planet gets closer to the star, it feels a burst of starlight, or radiation. The atmosphere becomes a cauldron of chemical reactions, and the winds ramp up far beyond hurricane force,”
