News About Extra Solar Planets 09-NOV-09 en-us Washington DC (SPX) Nov 02, 2009 - Astronomers may be closer than ever to discovering a planet that's habitable like our own, but along the way they've discovered some very scary exoplanets - places where conditions are far too harsh for life as we know it to exist.]]> Paris, France (ESA) Oct 29, 2009 - Satellite operations for the CoRoT mission have been extended until 31 March 2013. The decision by the French Space Agency, CNES, and the mission partners, including ESA, was taken on 23 October at a specially convened meeting at the CNES Headquarters in Paris.]]> Boulder CO (SPX) Oct 22, 2009 - The University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have been awarded a $495,000 grant to look for Earth-like planets around other stars using technology based on 2005 Nobel Prize-winning research conducted at JILA, a joint institute of the two Boulder institutions.]]> Paris, France (SPX) Oct 20, 2009 - At the international ESO/CAUP exoplanet conference in Porto, the team who built the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, better known as HARPS, the spectrograph for ESO's 3.6-metre telescope, have reported on the incredible discovery of some 32 new exoplanets, cementing HARPS's position as the world's foremost exoplanet hunter.]]> Barcelona, Spain (SPX) Oct 14, 2009 - Exoplanet scientists from around the world gathered in Barcelona from September 14 to 18 to debate and reach a consensus on defining guidelines for a new roadmap with the ultimate objective of finding habitable, and potentially inhabited, planets outside of our Solar System.]]> Bonn, Germany (SPX) Oct 13, 2009 - Even in ancient times, people observed the planets that orbit our Sun. (See also the astronomy question from week 1: Why are there seven days in a week?) Nowadays we know that there are many trillions of other stars in the Universe, in addition to the Sun. It seems likely that planets orbit many of these stars too.]]> St Louis MO (SPX) Oct 01, 2009 - So accustomed are we to the sunshine, rain, fog and snow of our home planet that we find it next to impossible to imagine a different atmosphere and other forms of precipitation.]]> Pasadena CA (SPX) Sep 25, 2009 - Astronomers have witnessed odd behavior around a young star. Something, perhaps another star or a planet, appears to be pushing a clump of planet-forming material around. The observations, made with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, offer a rare look into the early stages of planet formation.]]> Pasadena CA (JPL) Sep 24, 2009 - Astronomers have witnessed odd behavior around a young star. Something, perhaps another star or a planet, appears to be pushing a clump of planet-forming material around. The observations, made with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, offer a rare look into the early stages of planet formation.]]> Barcelona, Spain (UPI) Sep 16, 2009 - A rocky planet, five times larger than Earth, has been found outside the solar system, researchers reported Wednesday at a meeting in Spain.]]>