NASA finds oldest planet ever

[Lollypop 0]

NASA finds oldest planet ever

 

The oldest planet ever detected is nearly 13 billion years old and more than twice the size of Jupiter, locked in orbit around a whirling pulsar and a white dwarf.

 

NASA scientists say compared with the relative youth and stability of our own celestial neighborhood, where Earth and the other planets orbit a single 5-billion-year-old star in a quiet neighbourhood of the Milky Way, the ancient group that holds the oldest planet has had a boisterous past.

 

The old planet is located near the heart of a globular star cluster some 5,600 light years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius.

 

A light-year is about 10 trillion kilometres, about the distance light travels in a year.

 

Globular clusters were generally thought to be lousy environments for forming planets, because the clusters coalesced so early in the universe's development that the heavier elements needed to make planets were not yet present in abundance.

 

This finding, made with data from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, indicates that even globular clusters can produce planets despite the small amount of heavy elements, said Steinn Sigurdsson of Pennsylvania State University.

 

"What we think we've found is an example of the first generation of planets formed in the universe," Dr Sigurdsson said.

 

"We think this planet formed with its star, 12.713 billion years ago when the (Milky Way) galaxy was very young, just in the process of forming."

 

By comparison, Earth and the rest of our solar system is a third-generation affair, made from gas that was polluted by the ashes of earlier generations of stars.

 

And the sun is off by itself, not interacting directly with any other stars.

[Yillara Skye 1]

Darn you beat me to it... Thanks for posting it !! :biggrin:

[Lollypop 0]

Darn you beat me to it... Thanks for posting it !! :biggrin:

I mentioned I was a day in front.

[A l t e r E g o 9]

Darn you beat me to it... :lol: Thanks for posting it !! :)

I mentioned I was a day in front.

:biggrin: *The Twilight Zone theme begins* Thats right, you did! I only saw the story on tv, today!

[Captain Jean-Luc Picard 1]

How do they know how old the planet is? :biggrin:

[Yillara Skye 1]

Darn you beat me to it... :lol: Thanks for posting it !! :)

I mentioned I was a day in front.

:biggrin: *The Twilight Zone theme begins* Thats right, you did! I only saw the story on tv, today!

And I just had my mom send me the link!

[TrekkieMage 0]

Awesome! All the stuff they're finding out there is just so interesting! :biggrin: