A planet's year length depends on its distance from the Sun. Planets closer to the Sun have shorter years. A planet's rotation speed is unrelated to its year length. Planets' orbital speeds vary ...

Context. As a star evolves, the planet orbits change with time due to tidal interactions, stellar mass losses, friction and gravitational drag forces, mass accretion and evaporation on/by the planet.

Data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission has enabled the creation of a detailed catalog of asteroid rotations ...

Astronomers have for the first time managed to detect the rotation of an extrasolar planet, by analysing the way its atmosphere filters light. This technique could also provide clues about planet ...

Using new data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, researchers believe they have solved a longstanding mystery of solar system science: the length of a day on Saturn. It’s 10 hours, 33 minutes and 38 ...

The first exoplanets discovered tended to be gas giants orbiting close to their stars. That's because these are easy to find. Their large size and proximity to the star increase the signal caused by ...

A new study confirms that Earth's inner core has been rotating more slowly than usual since 2010. This mysterious "backtracking" could also end up slightly altering the planet's overall rotation, ...

In the search for new planets, a lot of the focus has been on finding some that reside in what's called the habitable zone. This is an area between where a planet's orbit receives enough starlight to ...

Photometry from Kepler has revealed the presence of cool starspots on the surfaces of thousands of stars, presenting a wide range of spot morphologies and lifetimes. Understanding the lifetime and ...

A team at Imperial College London utilized 1989 Voyager 2 data and supercomputer simulations to create the first detailed model of Neptune's magnetic field, revealing its highly unusual and dynamic ...

Belying its location in the deep freeze of the outer solar system, Neptune is anything but dormant. It sports giant storms and near-supersonic winds. Now, images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope ...