In a real-life twist on Star Wars' Tatooine—a harsh desert planet with twin suns and a criminal underbelly—astronomers have found a bizarre new world that orbits two stars at a perfect right angle.

Pluto has not completed a single orbit since its 1930 discovery. With a 248-year journey around the Sun, the dwarf planet will finish its first full circuit in 2178.

Every second, the Earth spins at an incredible speed, completing a full rotation in just 24 hours. While this may seem ordinary, the simple act of our planet turning on its axis is responsible for the ...

If you think auroras on Earth are a strange and mesmerizing sight, that's nothing like what occurs on the perplexing world of ...

A team of astronomers observed a confused exoplanet orbiting its two parent stars in a highly unusual way. As New Scientist reports, the planet, which was first discovered in 2004, is located in a ...

Somewhere deep below Saturn s cloud tops, the planet rotates at a constant speed. Determining this interior period of rotation has proven extremely complicated. Now, with new Cassini results, a team ...

A day on Earth lasts a familiar 24 hours, but across the solar system, time moves very differently. Some planets rotate slowly that a single day can last longer than an entire year, while others spin ...

It’s not so much a traditional clock as it is a measuring tool, but it’s all that’s needed to do some basic, interplanetary calculations As an example, the team suggests a scenario in which a ...

Tracking the rotation speed of solid planets, like the Earth and Mars, is a relatively simple task: Just measure the time it takes for a surface feature to roll into view again. But giant gas planets ...

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Earth has four seasons due to its 23.5-degree tilt and the shape of its orbit around the sun. But ...

A possible cousin of Pluto seems to be circling the far reaches of the solar system. The dwarf planet candidate 2017 OF201 travels in a superwide orbit, with the sun relatively near one end of its ...