The Mechanics of Earth's Spin Earth rotates once in about 24 hours with respect to the Sun, but once every 23 hours, 56 ...

Earth’s path around the Sun is not a fixed racetrack but a slowly shifting orbit, and those subtle changes have a long ...

Earth’s orbit around the Sun isn’t a perfect circle—it’s slightly elliptical. Each year, around July 2 or 3, Earth reaches its farthest point from the Sun, known as aphelion. Around January 2 or 3, ...

For the past 60 years, Earth has had a secret companion in space—a quasi-moon that has been sharing our planet’s orbit around ...

Astronomers recently detected a stray quasi-moon in our planet’s orbit, but it's hardly the first stowaway to hang out around ...

Tossing a bad guy into the Sun sounds simple enough, but orbital mechanics make it a far trickier task than you'd expect.