Extrasolar planets disappear after parent stars pluck them

September 18th, 2009 Kepler Mission is NASA's current mission which is reportedly going to last for four years. The mission is to be carried out by NASA and its major objective is to find planets like Earth through this mission.

June 11th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronomers have found a planet forming disk orbiting twin suns in images captured from radio telescopes. The sequence of images, collected with the Smithsonian's Submillimeter Array (SMA), provide an unusually vivid snapshot of the process of formation of giant planets, comets, and Pluto-like bodies.

May 26th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Since the early 1990s, astronomers have discovered more than 300 planets orbiting far away stars, nearly all of them being gas giants like Jupiter. Now, powerful telescopes, similar to NASA's recently launched Kepler Mission, will help spot much smaller rocky extrasolar planets, or exoplanets with water, more similar to earth.

May 18th, 2009 LONDON - The day is not far when it would be possible to see signs of life on planets far away from our own solar system-thanks to space telescopes that could soon be able to detect "biosignatures" in the light from planets orbiting other stars. Talking at an astrobiology meeting, scientists revealed that it could be possible to get clues of life on such exoplanets via tiny fraction of the parent star's light that interacts with the planet on its journey towards Earth.

May 14th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Kepler spacecraft, which launched into orbit on March 6, has being hunting for other Earth-like planets. The mission will spend the next three-and-a-half years staring at more than 100,000 stars for telltale signs of planets.

May 8th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have created an "astro-comb" to help astronomers detect lighter planets, more like Earth, around distant stars. In most cases, extrasolar planets can't be seen directly-the glare of the nearby star is too great-but their influence can be discerned through spectroscopy, which analyzes the energy spectrum of the light coming from the star.

May 8th, 2009 WASHINGTON - The ability to detect presence of extrasolar planets orbiting distant stars has got better with researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics creating an 'astro-comb' to detect lighter planets, more like the Earth, around distant stars. In most cases, extrasolar planets can't be seen directly - the glare of the nearby star is too great - but their influence can be discerned through spectroscopy, which analyses the kind of light emanating from the star.

April 28th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronomers have come across first time evidence of the destructive power of stars' tides, in the form of missing planets outside our solar system. According to University of Washington astronomer Rory Barnes, the idea that gravitational forces might pull a planet into its parent star has been predicted by computer models only in the last year or so, and this is the first evidence that such planet destruction has already occurred.

April 17th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Kepler mission has taken its first images of the star-rich sky where it will soon begin hunting for planets like Earth. The new images show the mission's target patch of sky, a vast starry field in the Cygnus-Lyra region of our Milky Way galaxy.

April 17th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Kepler mission has captured its first images of the star-rich sky where it will soon begin hunting for planets like Earth. The new 'first light' images show the mission's target patch of sky, a vast starry field in the Cygnus-Lyra region of our Milky Way galaxy.

April 8th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new study from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope hints that planets around stars cooler than our Sun might possess a different mix of potentially life-forming, or "prebiotic," chemicals. Astronomers used Spitzer to look for a prebiotic chemical, called hydrogen cyanide, in the planet-forming material swirling around different types of stars.

March 8th, 2009 LOS ANGELES - Kepler, a telescope that will scour the Milky Way for evidence of Earth-like planets, is orbiting the Sun as expected, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said Saturday. Aboard a three-stage Delta 2 rocket, the Kepler telescope blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida around 7:50 p.m.

February 21st, 2009 WASHINGTON - The search for extraterrestrial life will take another step in March, when NASA launches its Kepler satellite to systematically look for Earth-type planets orbiting other stars. The Kepler mission, named after the 17th century German astronomer, is to be launched March 5 and target 100,000 stars in the Milky Way galaxy that scientists believe could have planets orbiting in a 'habitable' zone, NASA scientists said Thursday.

February 19th, 2009 WASHINGTON - The search for extraterrestrial life will take another step in March, when NASA launches its Kepler satellite to systematically look for Earth-type planets orbiting other stars. The Kepler mission, named after the 17th century German astronomer, is to be launched March 5 and target 100,000 stars in the Milky Way galaxy that scientists believe could have planets orbiting in a 'habitable' zone, NASA scientists said Thursday.

February 19th, 2009 WASHINGTON - The search for extraterrestrial life will take another step in March, when NASA launches its Kepler satellite to systematically look for Earth-type planets orbiting other stars. The Kepler mission, named after the 17th century German astronomer, is to be launched March 5 and target 100,000 stars in the Milky Way galaxy that scientists believe could have planets orbiting in a 'habitable' zone, NASA scientists said Thursday.