The number of planets that orbit the sun depends on what you mean by “planet,” and that’s not so easy to define ...

There are eight planets in the solar system, and each travels on its own path around the sun. But of these planets, which is nearest to the sun? Mercury is a strange little world. There are some ...

An object eight times the mass of Jupiter may have swooped around the sun, coming superclose to Mars' present-day orbit before shoving four of the solar system's planets onto a different course.

These rocky bits eventually coalesced to form the terrestrial planets. However, at a distance of around 4 astronomical units from the Sun (AU; 1 AU is the average Sun-Earth distance of 93 million ...

Graphic visualisation of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a vast 500,000 mile-wide coronal hole in the sun's ...

Around the Sun, only Venus and Mercury have an orbit ... NASA launches mission to find hints How such a range of planet sizes can form so close to their star remains a topic of hot debate.

The planets will appear to line up — but no more than usual. The planets in our solar system orbit the sun in more or less the same flat plane as the Earth, according to EarthSky.org ...

The planets in our solar system orbit the sun essentially along a line across the sky in a plane called the ecliptic. For that reason, planets in our Earthly sky always appear somewhere along a ...