General relativity helps explain the lack of planets around tight binary stars by driving orbital resonances that eject or destroy close-in worlds. This process naturally creates a “desert” of ...

New research suggests Einstein's general relativity explains the rarity of planets orbiting two suns. In tight binary systems ...

Precession-driven fluid dynamics concerns the intricate motions arising when a rotating body experiences a slow, conical motion of its spin axis, a phenomenon that is pivotal in both geophysical and ...

Toy gyroscopes can do all kinds of interesting tricks. The most mysterious one, precession, seems to defy gravity. By definition, precession refers to a change in the orientation of the rotational ...

ALTHOUGH the Earth revolves around the Sun, from our point of view we see the Sun moving around the sky along an imaginary circle called the ecliptic once every 365.256 days. This is known as the ...

It wasn’t too long after Newton published his laws of motion that people noticed something was off about them. To be specific, they were off by the orbit of an entire planet. And they remained off ...

Earth's axial precession is a gyroscopic wobble, analogous to a spinning top, causing its axis of rotation to trace a cone over time. The primary cause of Earth's precession is the gravitational ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. The Earth's precession is captured in stunning detail in this image by a veteran ...