There is more than meets the eye for a distant gas giant planet. Astronomers have discovered that the extrasolar planet, or "exoplanet," not only has one of the weirdest orbits ever seen, but it is ...

Hot Jupiters, the blisteringly close cousins of our own Jupiter, were once treated as cosmic misfits. Now their orbital patterns are turning into a kind of forensic record, revealing how these giants ...

Berkeley — A bound pair of icy comets similar to the dirty snowballs circling outside the orbit of Neptune has been found lurking in the shadow of Jupiter. Astronomers at the University of California, ...

The first planet ever found orbiting another star was detected in 1995, and it belonged to a class now known as a “hot Jupiter.” These exoplanets are comparable in mass to Jupiter but circle their ...