For folks in the United States, July evenings mean 4th of July fireworks. While you're waiting for the show, be sure to watch ...

Astronomers describe Mercury as an "inferior planet", because its orbital path around the sun is much closer than that of ...

That means the spacecraft moved from the ecliptic plane, and tilted its orbit to 17 degrees in relation with the Sun's equator.

Last week saw scientists celebrating a breakthrough in bowel cancer prevention. The study, by the University of Edinburgh and the Cancer Research UK Scotland Centre, uncovered bowel cancer’s ...

If you treat the planets like dots and connect them, they would broadly appear to follow a curved line on the horizon. That line is called the ecliptic, and it looks similar to the arc-like path ...

Escaping the ecliptic plane takes some doing, by which I mean a lot of very expensive rocket fuel. The Solar Orbiter used Venus's gravity to help pull it out of the usual equatorial orbit around ...

Breaking free of the ecliptic plane is an immensely fuel-intensive maneuver, and until now, only the ESA/NASA Ulysses mission, which launched in 1990 and ended in 2009, has flown high enough to ...

Until now, all observations of the Sun have been made from a single perspective which is directly facing its equator from the same plane in which Earth and most other planets orbit that is known ...

The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter captured the first-ever images of the sun's south pole in March, which were released this week.