Figure 1: Optical images of the region of GRB 050509B showing the association with a large elliptical galaxy. Figure 3: X-ray afterglow light curve for GRB 050509B showing weak flux falling off to ...

Elliptical galaxies lack the swirling arms of their more well-known siblings, spiral galaxies. Instead, they bear the rounded shape of an ellipse, a stretched-out circle. One of the most famous ...

So what does this mean? Earth's orbit is not a perfect circle. It is elliptical, or slightly oval-shaped. This means there is one point in the orbit where Earth is closest to the Sun, and another ...