News About Extra Solar Planets 20-NOV-09 en-us Huntsville AL (SPX) Nov 20, 2009 - You don't always have to have a rocket to do rocket science. Sometimes a mere airplane will do - that is, a mere Boeing 747 toting a 17-ton, 9-foot wide telescope named SOFIA.]]> Moffett Field CA (SPX) Nov 20, 2009 - Dark energy isn't good for life in the universe. This mysterious substance, which cosmologists believe makes up around 70 percent of the universe, may eventually pull apart galaxies, then stars and planets, and finally atoms and molecules, in what some call the Big Rip.]]> Moffett Field CA (SPX) Nov 19, 2009 - Two teams of astronomers have found that extrasolar planet HAT-P-7b, discovered in 2008, has a retrograde or highly tilted orbit.]]> Paris, France (SPX) Nov 18, 2009 - A ground-breaking census of 500 stars, 70 of which are known to host planets, has successfully linked the long-standing "lithium mystery" observed in the Sun to the presence of planetary systems. Using ESO's successful HARPS spectrograph, a team of astronomers has found that Sun-like stars that host planets have destroyed their lithium much more efficiently than "planet-free" stars.]]> Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Nov 18, 2009 - Two teams of astronomers have found that extrasolar planet HAT-P-7b, discovered in 2008, has a retrograde or highly tilted orbit. On UT May 30, 2009, a Japanese collaboration team led by Norio Narita (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan) used the Subaru Telescope's High Dispersion Spectrograph (HDS) to observe the HAT-P-7 planetary system, which is about 1000 light-years distant from Earth, and found the first evidence of a retrograde orbit of the extrasolar planet HAT-P-7b.]]> 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.]]>