Across the Milky Way and beyond, planetary systems appear to fall into a few recurring blueprints, and recent exoplanet ...

Star and planet formation has largely been considered separate, sequential processes. But in a new study, scientists at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) have modeled a different scenario where ...

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 giant planets weren't always where we find them today. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune formed in a more compact configuration and later underwent a violent reshuffling that scattered them to ...