Researchers from MIT and Aarhus University in Denmark have solved a decades-long riddle, demonstrating for the first time that the circular orbits maintained by Earth and the other planets in the Milky Way are not unique to our solar system’s worlds.
As the authors report in the latest edition of The Astrophysical Journal, they discovered a total of 74 exoplanets, some located hundreds of light years from Earth, that orbit their respective stars in essentially circular patterns, maintaining essentially the same distance at all times.
Astronomers had long wondered if these types of orbits were considered rare for planets located in other parts of the universe, and the new paper reveals that this type of orbital regularity is the norm, at least when it comes to planets that are roughly the same size as Earth
http://interstellar-news.blogspot.com/2015/06/circular-orbits-common-amongst-earth.html
