Many people are surprised to learn that the majority of stars you see in the night sky are actually binary star systems , where two stars orbit each other. Since many of these systems likely host planets, sunsets like that on Tatooine are probably quite common in the universe!
Figure 1: Particles in an eccentric polar orbit after 10,000 years (left) and 7 million years (right). The binary stars orbit with a semi-major axis of 0.5 AU and eccentricity of 0.8. Figure 1 in today's paper.
The Hubble Telescope Checks In With the Most Distant Planets - The New York Times
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows on Jupiter. All you need is the keen eyesight of the Hubble Space Telescope for a close-up look at the candy-colored ribbons of clouds and storms on the face of the solar system's largest planet.
Every year the Hubble is deployed to make a visual "grand tour" of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
New Deep Learning Method Adds 301 Planets to Kepler's Total Count
Over 4,5000 planets have been found around other stars, but scientists expect that our galaxy contains millions of planets. There are multiple methods for detecting these small, faint bodies around much larger, bright stars.
Scientists recently added a whopping 301 newly validated exoplanets to the total exoplanet tally. The throng of planets is the latest to join the 4,569 already validated planets orbiting a multitude of distant stars. How did scientists discover such a huge number of planets, seemingly all at once?
Ask Ethan: Why are planets always round? - Big Think
Not only all of the planets in our Solar System, but many of the moons and smaller objects, plus the Sun, are all round.
Above a size of around ~400 kilometers in radius, practically all rocky bodies are round, and above ~200 kilometers in radius, most icy bodies are, too.
Curious Kids: what are the rings around planets made of?
Lots of us are familiar with pictures of the planet Saturn and its unmistakable ring. In fact, Saturn doesn't have just one ring – if you look through a telescope, you will see that Saturn actually has at least eight rings . This is called a ring system.
Saturn is not the only planet with rings. Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus all have ring systems too, but their rings are smaller, dimmer and more difficult to see.
Eris, Pluto, and the dwarf planets - Delaware Gazette
In January 2005, a team of astronomers at Palomar Observatory led by Mike Brown from Caltech looked at three images of the same star field taken over three hours.
All the stars remained in their expected positions. However, one tiny point of light moved almost imperceptibly.
One year on this giant, blistering hot planet is just 16 hours long -- ScienceDaily
The hunt for planets beyond our solar system has turned up more than 4,000 far-flung worlds, orbiting stars thousands of light years from Earth. These extrasolar planets are a veritable menagerie, from rocky super-Earths and miniature Neptunes to colossal gas giants.
Among the more confounding planets discovered to date are "hot Jupiters" -- massive balls of gas that are about the size of our own Jovian planet but that zing around their stars in less than 10 days, in contrast to Jupiter's plodding, 12-year orbit.
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