James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

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.

There are incalculable oddities in our solar system, and myriad ways that planets are different from Earth. One surprising factor you might not have considered is how planets rotate. While we all ...

Thanks to NASA's Cassini spacecraft which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, scientists have been able to observe for the first time ever the seasonal atmospheric circulation direction change on ...

Every second, the Earth spins at an incredible speed, completing a full rotation in just 24 hours. While this may seem ...

Earth’s rotation is slowly slowing, scientists say, meaning days are getting longer, though the change takes millions of years, raising intriguing questions about how time, life and the planet quietly ...

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 ...

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have measured the rotation rate of an extreme exoplanet by observing the varied brightness in its atmosphere. This is the first measurement of the ...

The famed science fiction author Isaac Asimov called them "ribbon worlds" — planets forced to always show one face to their parent star. The star side is locked in perpetual day, its sun never dipping ...

An instantaneous cessation of Earth's rotation would result in catastrophic, planet-wide devastation due to the inertia of objects on the surface moving at high speeds (approximately 1000 mph at the ...