Astronomers find oldest planet yet

[SKULLS_Viper 0]

Link

Quote[/b] ]Astronomers said Thursday the oldest and most distant planet yet found is a huge, gaseous sphere 13 billion years old and 5,600 light years away, a discovery that could change theories about when planets formed and when life could have evolved.

The planet, more than twice the size of Jupiter, orbits two stars, a pulsar and a white dwarf that linked together about a billion years ago. The system is in the constellation Scorpius within a globular cluster called M4 that contains stars that formed billions of years before the sun and its planets.

"All of the stars in this cluster are about the same age, so the presumption is that the planet is that age also," Harvey Richer, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, said Thursday at a NASA news conference.

The pulsar, a rapidly spinning star, was discovered in M4 about 15 years ago. Astronomers shortly afterward found that it was gravitationally bound to a white dwarf, the remnants of an ancient, sunlike star that had exhausted its hydrogen and helium fuel. There was suspicion that yet another body was orbiting nearby, but the planet was not discovered until astronomers studied data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Alan Boss, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, said finding such an ancient planet is a "startling revelation" because it means that planets could have formed within a billion years after the big bang, far earlier than most theories have stated.

"This means that 13 billion years ago, life could have arisen and then died out," said Boss. "This has immense implications."

Astronomers in recent years have found 107 other extra-solar planets _ planets outside of the solar system _ but all of those are about the same age or just slightly older than the sun, 4.5 billion years.

It was thought that planets could not form until there had been at least one generation of stars after the Big Bang because the planet building requires heavier elements, such as carbon, silicate and iron. These elements, called "metals" by astronomers, are thought to have formed during the life cycle of the early stars, when hydrogen and helium were burned in fusion fires.

The sun is a third-generation star, but the M4 stars are believed to be in the first generation after the Big Bang, some 14 billion years ago.

Boss said the solar system has about 30 times as many heavier elements as M4.

Harvey said the discovery suggests that astronomers should now search for planets in the more ancient star fields, which includes systems like the M4 globular cluster.

"The door is open now to start looking in the metal-poor clusters," he said.

Steinn Sigurdsson, a professor of astronomy at Pennsylvania State University, said that based on orbital measurements and other data, astronomers can infer a history for the M4 planet.

He said it is believed the planet formed about a sunlike star near the edge of the globular cluster. Over time, the star and its planet were gravitationally captured by the pulsar, which was then a neutron star with another star as a companion. As the sunlike star was sucked into the mix, the companion star was ejected from the group. This left the sunlike star and neutron star bound to each other while the planet orbited both.

Eventually, the sunlike star burned up its fuel, bloomed into a red giant and then collapsed into a white dwarf. The neutron star, with its greater density, sucked in material from the collapsing star. This caused the neutron star to start spinning at 100 times a second and emitting radio signals, turning into a pulsar. It was the clocklike pulsing of these radio signals, picked up by radio telescopes, that led to other observations and the discovery of the complex.

Sigurdsson said there were enough heavy elements in the M4 complex to have formed some terrestrial planets, like Earth and Mars, in orbit of the sunlike star. He said it is theoretically possible that life could have formed on those planets some 12.5 billion years ago.

But when the sunlike star was pulled into orbit of the neutron star, any planets near the sun would have been destroyed. Only the gaseous planet, orbiting some two billion miles out, would have survived.

"Over a billion years ago, any near-in planet would have been wiped out," said Sigurdsson. "But it could have been stable for 10 billion years before," plenty of time for intelligent life to have formed.

If there was intelligent life on such a planet, he said, it was destroyed as the parent sun was pulled toward the neutron star.

"They would have seen it coming," Sigurdsson said of creatures that may then have been living on that planet.

____

On the Net:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov

Space Telescope Science Institute: http://hubblesite.org/news/2003/19

Intresting.

edit:made URL

[Koolkid101 0]

Wow thats old...... So thingys lived there a long time ago?? Then it became all like Jupiter?

[SKULLS_Viper 0]

I guess thats a picture of the planet(of course I think its a model of what it looks like)."Oldest known planet Indentified".

[Guest]

lol.......I can't believe they are discussing life on this planet. Must be tough to pull a budget for some Hubble-time at the moment....

[Akira 0]

lol.......I can't believe they are discussing life on this planet. Must be tough to pull a budget for some Hubble-time at the moment....  

Don't think its about life on this planet.

It's the fact of how old this planet is, and the possibility that life could have risen and died before we were pickin' dingleberries outta our fur.

Scientifically speaking, this has direct implications for not only stellar theory, but planet formation theory, possibilities of life elsewhere, how we look at our own evolution and planet foramtion, and more importantly that we are not the end all be all of life evolution.

[bn880 5]

I guess thats a picture of the planet(of course I think its a model of what it looks like)."Oldest known planet Indentified".

Oh yeah I know that planet, used to go for vacations there back in the old days.

I'm still wondering about this odd planet that's suppost to come somewhat near the earth once every couple thousand years or so. Well it's one of the translations of Sumerian documents if I remember. Weird.

[Guest]

It's the fact of how old this planet is, and the possibility that life could have risen and died before we were pickin' dingleberries outta our fur.

Scientifically speaking, this has direct implications for not only stellar theory, but planet formation theory, possibilities of life elsewhere, how we look at our own evolution and planet foramtion, and more importantly that we are not the end all be all of life evolution.

Ya......the implications for those areas of theory are interesting. It's the fact that they start with the whole "Maybe there was life there once..." garbage. Like duh! Of course there is a possibility......and a much larger possibility that there wasn't life there. A totally pointless discussion that comes up everytime someone finds a planet and it gets reported in the media. What makes me question it a bit is why do scientists bother humouring journalists about it? I suggest it makes there discovery a little more "public friendly" and doesn't hurt the chances of continued funding.

This discovery has nothing to do with the possibilities of life on other planets...but it gets a mention anyway. Why...?

[Tex -USMC- 0]

slow news day?

[Tovarish 0]

Incidentally, the pictures the Hubble telescope takes are all black and white...so whenever you see these pictures of colorful distant planets and nebulae....that's Photoshop.

[Renagade 0]

Isn`t that the same case with photos of virus`s or was virii the correct spelling

[Guest]

virus' (gee.there's an emotion for everything)

[Phleep 0]

virus'              (gee.there's an emotion for everything)

viruses

[bn880 5]

Incidentally, the pictures the Hubble telescope takes are all black and white...so whenever you see these pictures of colorful distant planets and nebulae....that's Photoshop.

Well in some cases it's a little more scientific than photoshop, but actually of this particular planet there are no hubble images at all, or any other ones.

[DarkLight 0]

Wow thats old...... So thingys lived there a long time ago?? Then it became all like Jupiter?

No, they didn't say things lived their, but however, it is possible that there once lived stuff there. But the chance that there once were living things is very very very small...

[Harnu 0]

Exactly how do they figure out that it's 5,600 lightyears away?

[DracoPaladore 0]

Exactly how do they figure out that it's 5,600 lightyears away?

Math

[Harnu 0]

I know that much! lol. I mean I vagely remeber learning things in 7th and 8th grade about taking a look at it, from one position of Earths orbit, then taking a look at it from another. Then all that trig prolly comes into play.

But what is/are the process they use to determine that?

[blackdog~ 0]

I know that much! lol.  I mean I vagely remeber learning things in 7th and 8th grade about taking a look at it, from one position of Earths orbit, then taking a look at it from another.  Then all that trig prolly comes into play.

But what is/are the process they use to determine that?

They probably use frikin' laser beams

[Skul 0]

I'd like to add another question to this...

How do they know how old a planet is?

"Excuse me, Mr./Mrs. Planet... if you don't mind telling us... how old are you?"

"I'm very young. Only 180 billion years old..."

[Gareth Gates must die]

[DracoPaladore 0]

They have to determine alot of things. Like the size of it's star/sun, it's colour, blue shift, red shift, size, the whole process I heard is quite complicated.

[ralphwiggum 6]

They probably use frikin' laser beams

laser beams travel at speed of light. so if a planet is several light years away. good luck.

to be honest, i don't know how they do it either.

[Cpt.Gumbo 0]

Hmm, 13 billion years old? Come on, the world is not even close to being that old, I kinda find this hard to believe.

[Tovarish 0]

Hmm, 13 billion years old? Come on, the world is not even close to being that old, I kinda find this hard to believe.

I see that the "The Earth is the center of the Universe" theory is still alive and well

[Cpt.Gumbo 0]

Quote[/b] ]I see that the "The Earth is the center of the Universe" theory is still alive and well

Yes the Earth is the center of the universe, and also  its flat and there are sea monsters.

[Guest]

Size and colour shift most certainly are used. Also if you take the assumption that the universe is expanding, and at a determinable rate then you can use that information as well. All stars/planets etc appear to be moving away from the Earth...they are of course all moving away from each other, but you can get a lot of information from this and use it as the basis for working out how far away something is by how fast it appears to be moving away from us.

Make sense?