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Oldest Planet Ever Discovered
crymeph0 writes "NASA has found the oldest known planet in a globular star cluster in the constellation Scorpius. At 13.7 billion years old, it's just slighly (~1 billion years) younger than the universe itself. Get more info from HubbleSite"
Given a few years or even a few decades, technology would have had improved vastly that I'm sure we will see more older ones.
How do they know the universe is 14.7 billion years old?
Finally a competition for my mother-in-law.
at not being an expert by any means, I wonder how they detected it. I assume (because it is so massive and in a binary system) they detected it by the normal "wobble" method. Does anyone know?
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Now that IS impressive!
Oldest Planet Is Revealed, Challenging Old Theories By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
In new observations of a distant region of primitive stars, astronomers have found the oldest known planet, a huge gaseous object almost three times as old as Earth and nearly as old as the universe itself.
The discovery, based on measurements by the Hubble Space Telescope, challenged scientists to rethink theories of how, when and where planets form. It is tantalizing evidence, astronomers said, that planets began appearing billions of years earlier than previously thought and so may be more abundant.
Astronomers reported yesterday that the planet is more than twice as massive as Jupiter and is orbiting a pair of burned-out stars. It appears to have formed 12.7 billion years ago, within a billion years of the origin of the universe in the theorized Big Bang.
"What we think we have found is an example of the first generation of planets formed in the universe," Dr. Steinn Sigurdsson of Pennsylvania State University announced at a news conference at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Washington.
A detailed report by Dr. Sigurdsson and his colleagues is being published today in the journal Science.
Dr. Alan P. Boss, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, who was not involved in the research, called the discovery a "stunning revelation" that will force scientists to revise their ideas of planetary formation.
The discovery challenged a widely held view among astrophysicists that planets could not have originated so early because the universe had yet to generate enough of the heavy elements needed to make them.
Planet-making ingredients include iron, silicon and other elements heavier than helium and hydrogen. These so-called metallic elements are cooked in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and accumulate from the ashes of dying stars, which are recycled in new stars and their families of planets.
The planet was found in the heart of a group of extremely ancient stars, known as a globular star cluster. This cluster, M4, is 7,200 light-years from Earth in the summer constellation Scorpius. The stars there are estimated to have formed almost 13 billion years ago, so early that the region is deficient in heavy elements.
Astronomers had assumed that such primitive stars could not have planets, and observations of other globular clusters seemed to support that view until the detection of the "Methuselah planet," in Dr. Boss's phrase.
The Sun and its planetary system are about 4.6 billion years old, products of what astronomers call the third generation of stars. By that time, the gas and dust of interstellar space was richer in heavy elements. In less than a decade, astronomers have discovered planets around more than 100 Sun-like stars in the Milky Way, Earth's home galaxy.
The research began in 1988 when a pulsar, a rapidly spinning stellar remnant, was discovered in the M4 cluster. Further observations revealed that the pulsar was linked gravitationally with a white dwarf star, an object that has exhausted its nuclear fuel. Later, astronomers noticed irregularities in the pulsar signals, betraying the presence of a third object, which was orbiting the other two.
The recent Hubble telescope examination determined the mass and other properties of the object. It cannot be seen, only inferred from its effects on the pulsar's motions. And the neighborhood is an unlikely place for a planet. It is almost surely a planet, astronomers said, but not one that is likely to be hospitable to life.
The research team also reported that the distant planet probably has had a tempestuous life, surviving the shock waves of stars aborning and dying explosively all around. The small star and its planet probably formed in the suburbs of the star cluster, then migrated toward the center and came too close to the ancient pulsar, which captured them. The three objects together were themselves flu
I love these astronomical time scales:
"Sorry I'm 15 min late..."
"Oh never mid, here we don't mind a billion years more or less..."
What struck me the most from reading about it is that enough heavy elements (Fe, Si, etc) were around at the time to form the planet. That was one of the main reasons it was thought that planets couldn't have formed that early - you only had light gases around. So apparently it doesn't take a few billions years of fusion to get enough solid material for a planet. I wonder what other changes this will bring about in terms of the search-for-life campaign. The window just got a little bigger.
if it has to be explained, it's not funny, it's offtopic
"Oldest Planet Ever Discovered"
NASA has found the oldest known planet in a globular star cluster in the constellation SCOrpius.
Go back to your planet Darl!
This Dr. Richer is not fit to be quoted in an article linked to here. This space is for speculation that
1. There was a civilization on that planet 12.7 billion years ago,
2. There's water or oil on it
3. 20 years from now it'll be a more popular space tourism destination than the moon.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
It's a pity that we still have to detect planets by there gravitational pull on the suns they orbit. This will only alow us to "see" gaseous giants (like jupiter) who have lotsa mass. The earth-like planet have much too little mass to ever see with this method.
I know people are tring to detect the reflection of the stars (of it's sun) light, but that's pretty hard since you have to filter it out from the light directly recieved from that star. But if we would really try and be lucky, could we see the planet directly when another planet is blocking our view of the star?
Just my $0.02. $0.04 with inflation correction and VAT.
..somewhere near the start..
Would they conclude that it was unlikely that life could evolve in this system for one reason or another based upon their own standards?
Stromthurmond
I would be *really* impressed if only NASA have had found the oldest known planet in a globular beowulf star cluster in the constellation Scorpius.
didn't they also discover a few stars that were older than the universe a few years ago? bah
Karma: Bad due to google bombing - Robert Watkins woz 'ere.
Personally, I think it's a bit too early to be writing articles on youngest planets... It is indeed significant to our findings on the way planets form that one would have existed this early, and for this, the properties of the planet merit more study; however, considering that the discovery of planets outside our solar system is a relatively new thing in the scheme of things, I think writing over-hyped (it is on the front page of Yahoo) articles about the youngest planet ever being found is a bit out of place...
In an interview, the planet attributed its longevity to never smoking or drinking and eating a balanced diet of meteorites and cosmic dust. However, the planet suffers intermittently from Alzheimer's, and currently believes itself to be the Imperial Death Star.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
It could be, and most probably is a gas giant like Jupiter. If so, then why should its formation so early in the universe be such a big surprise? Jupiter itself is largely made up of light gases which would have been present in abundance in such regions in the early universe. The fact that there's a supernova remnant there (a pulsar, the article says) tells me that any heavy elements (if they are required) could have come from the results of that explosion.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
And if you want to avoid that whole NYT thing, just follow my sig. I've had the story since yesterday. :^P
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It fails to mention a name, unless I'm crazy.
It's not that old!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The most accurate estimation of the age of the universe has been recently carried out by the WMAP mission, which measured the cosmic microwave background with 35 times the resolution of the previous COBE mission. The universe is 13.7 billion years old, plus or minus 200 million years.
It could be that this planet is the site of the Fountain of Old, and that would explain its apparent age. Wait a while, and it'll eventually be older that the universe.
it's just slighly (~1 billion years) younger than the universe itself
Is it just me or should that read older
Three of them concluded there couldn't be intelligent life. Two got as far as visiting before deciding the area was a dump and the final one broadcasts live 24/7 from the planet on a dedicated TV channel called "Xdfugy Dskak" which the closet translation for in English is "Big Brother".
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
It may be the oldest planet on record based on visiuals from it's light that finally reached Earth for observation. But in reality, the star could have turned super nova for all we know. Again, what we are seeing is a delay in observation.
Life is not for the lazy.
Estimating from the decay of Uranium has been used. However, it could give a different answer to that obtained by estimating the expansion, although there was some overlap in the numbers because neither were that accurate. The best results have been obtained from latest measurements of the cosmic microwave background.
I always figured you could tell how old planets were by how universe-weary and crotchety they were. "You damn kids! Read the sign! STAY OFF THE GAS CLOUD!" I guess red shift works, though. And it does fill the holes in my theory. Out of curiosity, isn't it against the odds for the planet to still be around?
[...]in a globular beowulf star cluster[...] of these
Published, but requires a paid subscription.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Well, they're begging the question somewhat, but it seems true that globular clusters metal deficient. Jupiter's atmosphere is 82% hydrogen, 14% helium and only a trace of heavier elements. Who knows what goes on at the core, but that would seem to indicate that planets don't need rock to form.
That said, if we found some moons around it somehow at some point in the future, there would be a lot of questions that need answering.
Is it worrying anyone else, though, how thoroughly we're cutting in to the upper estimate of the age of the universe according to Big Bang Theory? Prior guesses on the age of the universe in BBT were in the 9-12 billion range.
Invoking tweaks on inflation theory and 'anti-gravity' via the cosmological constant, the upper limit has been moved up to 15 billion years. Now here we are with a planet... a close planet (all things considered, 7200 light years isn't that far away on a grand scale :), that's 13 billion years old plus star and cluster formation time, and some of the other observations from the furthest visible reaches coming back from ye olde Hubble... how much further can we cut into this without jeopardizing the 15 billion year estimate?
Something to consider...
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
It still IS the oldest planet as far as we are concerned.
We can't tell what may or may not happen in our future until it does happen.
.... and on it, no doubt, the oldest laffy taffy ever :O
losers
Laws are for people with no friends.
Oldest Planet EVER!!!!
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Could somebody tell me if those billion are 10^9 or 10^12? I suspect the latter, although an American source kind-of implies the former...?
And isn't it about time something was done to stop this confusion?
Im at work right now I dont want to google it out...
slashdot is ok at work and google isn't?
If this planet or its satellites were populated by a new species, they could litterally be called "older than dirt"
Learn something new.
I realise that it is a stupid question but I would like to know the answer.
Obviously a star is luminous and a planet isn't but even a planet like jupiter emits more energy than it receives.
As to what is luminous and what isn't.. well most people think of the visible spectrum but that is just because we judge visibility that way.
So, when does a planet become a binary companion?
Cuiusvis hominis est errare; nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare.
From the article:
"It appears to have formed 12.7 billion years ago, within a billion years of the origin of the universe in the theorized Big Bang."
It's not 13.7 billion years old, it's 12.7 billion year old. Yeah, yeah, I know, what's 1 billion years between friends?
"Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose." --Douglas Adams
If you dont mind reading the article ./ just takes a minute. ;-)
cu,
Lispy
Perhaps planetary systems evolving in dense star populations are significantly different to the solar system.
Perhaps extragallactic planetary systems are significantly different to gallactic systems.
There is no 'normal' until we have a real comparison. These extra solar giants are fascinating but are only 'visible' to us because of their size. My personal view is that for any planetary system to support technology and intelligence (preferably in the same species, lol) would have to have a gas giant to hoover up the junk within the system.
Are you old enough to remember the surprises that planetary weather brought to us? I look for nothing less from our extrasolar kin. Those planets will knock the socks off us once we know about them properly.
Cuiusvis hominis est errare; nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare.
For the first couple of months after the observatory was built I had constant dreams about the observatory being broken into, being stolen, being destroyed by various means, this includes storms, earthquakes, volcanoes and once by an "Angel" from Neon Genesis Evangelion That would be bad, right?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
He *did* mention clusters....
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
i've seen older.
I write code.
Hang on, how do they know it's a planet? Couldn't it be a stellar remnant, i.e. the core of a star that has had its outer layers blown off by a nearby nova or supernova?
Considering that it's orbiting both a white dwarf and a neutron star, and I'd definitely consider both of those to be the ultimate "smoking guns", *and* that current theories deny the existence of sufficient "metals" for planet formation in that epoch, I'd say the astronomers concerned here are jumping to unwarranted conclusions.
Because, you know, back when I was a little lad, new discoveries were peer reviewed and independently verified before being announced as fact. Especially so when a single data source is quoted, and especially especially so when they're based on incestuous reasoning: if we're right about what gravitational wobble should look like for bodies X and Y at distance Z, then we've just found bodies X and Y, therefore the theory is right! Tenure for everyone!
Until we get Hubble II up there to take independent readings which can be independently analysed, this is a theory awaiting review. An exciting theory, but a theory. If you want to believe it, go ahead and believe it, but I'm in no hurry to pencil it in to my Big Book of the Universe.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
BTW- The original paper is avaliable in today's issue of Science and I think it should be readable for someone with one college astronomy class.
Not necessarily, a true geek would sleep through astronomy class. Well, most of it anyway - but only upon hearing the words "binary star system"
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
"At 13.7 billion years old, it's just slightly (~1 billion years) younger than the universe itself"
Well, that answers the chicken & egg problem!
You glance at the title and see "Oldest patent discovered" and wonder what it was for and who's trying to make money from it.
Globular clusters are deficient in heavier elements because they formed so early in the universe that heavier elements had not been cooked up in abundance in the nuclear furnaces of stars. Some astronomers have therefore argued that globular clusters cannot contain planets. This conclusion was bolstered in 1999 when Hubble failed to find close-orbiting "hot Jupiter"-type planets around the stars of the globular cluster 47 Tucanae.
Goes to show you that even if the probability of something happening is (seemingly) very low, the numbers the Universe presents to us still make it possible. People should be careful about drawing conclusions based solely on conjecture when they're speaking of the (nearly) infinite.
You can't ride two horses with one ass
This cluster, M4, is 7,200 light-years from Earth in the summer constellation Scorpius.
p ). Does that make it just at the neighbourhood of Earth?
Earth, it's sun and it's galaxy (Milky Way) is 100,000 light years across (http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/sci/A0859648.html) and the nearest galaxy (Andromeda galaxy) is about 2 million light years away (http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/A/AndromG1al.as
Maybe we can go there someday.
Great. NASA found Z'ha'dum --the last place we should send explorers!
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
That 15 billion figure was thrown out when the WMAP data were received. We are now pretty sure that the universe is between 13.5 and 13.9 billion years. About a billion years is long enough for stars and presumably low-metallicity planets to form. We aren't really cutting it close to the age of the universe.
It's mine! Mine I tell you, mine!!!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I understand using background radiation to measure the age of the universe, and I understand the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram and its use to determine a star's age.. but... what is it that they do to determine the age of said planet? Its only 5,600 light years away, so at best you could assume it was 5,600 years old right?
I'm confused. (And how did they figure out that light year thing too eh?)
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
Current cosmological theory holds that the universe is shaped like a 4 dimensional hyperbola. At T=0, the structure is continuous.
Think about being 1 klick north of the South pole. Let the north/south axis be time, and the east/west axis be space. Now, move 1 klick south. Is there an abrupt discontinuity? No, things are still smooth. What is south of you? Mu ("unask the question") - the concept of "south" is undefined at that point.
Now, the "south end" of the hyperbolic universe has the same sort of property - while continuous, it does not extent past the T=0 point.
(yes, there is the "other half" of a hyperbola that exists beyond the T=0 point, but that half is not contiguous with the first half.)
www.eFax.com are spammers
What struck me the most from reading about it is that enough heavy elements (Fe, Si, etc) were around at the time to form the planet. That was one of the main reasons it was thought that planets couldn't have formed that early - you only had light gases around.
Jupiter was able to accrete despite being mostly hydrogen - I don't see why you couldn't get a planet forming out of the primordial elements. Spectroscopic analysis of this planet would be interesting, as it should mostly lack the hydrocarbons that we find in Jupiter. Unfortunately, unless we can observe transits, we won't be able to do spectroscopy without a much better telescope.
There would also be enough lithium present after the big bang nucleosynthesis to create solid bodies, though of course there was still vastly more hydrogen and helium.
Lastly, early in the universe's life there would have been many very massive stars produced as galaxies first formed. These would have gone supernova within tens to hundreds of millions of years, seeding the universe with heavy elements quite early. For estimates of exact numbers involved, ask an astrophysicist.
Is that where God lives?
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
I can't tell you how many nights' sleep I've lost over this.
"If you're thinking what I'm thinking, you're right." -
Large stars- a few times more massive than the sun- evolve and die quickly, sometimes in less than a billion years.
I am overloard Crang from the oldest planet Zoltar. I am cousins with Napolean.
The doppler method, conducted from the surface of the earth is limited to about 3 meters a second. This limits it to large planets and/or planets that orbit quickly, i.e. close-in. Thats why most of the 110 or so planets discovered this way are "wierd", very large, or very close to their Sun so they orbit in weeks. Jupiter is too small and too far out to be generate a detectable wobble.
Space-based woble methods may give a lot more detectibility because they avoid atmospheric blurring. Also a new satellite called "Kepler" will look for planetary eclipse transits. These can be quite rare. Kepler plans to watch the same patch of the sky for five years with a 350 megapixel camera looking for eclipses.
The thing about astronomy that always gives me the heebie-jeebies is the use of the word "is", as in in, "the planet is in orbit...". In reality, in all probability, the proper word is "was", as in "the planet was in orbit before its star system went nova 6.3 billion years ago".
Seriously. This planet is approximately 430,000,000 times older than I am. Does anyone else ever step back from the factual data and try to think of it in human terms? I love the night sky, but dang, there's nothing else that can make me feel so insignificant. <shiver>brrrr<shiver>
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Hey, it's another MICROTHOFT JOKETH!
Get back to your short bus. -5, Unoriginal.
This very much lends creditability to the argument that if there is or was intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, there is no guarantee that it would just happen to coincide with the time that we monkeys are hoping around on our world. We may very well indeed be alone if we arived late, or too early to the party so to speak.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Really, there is no evidence given that this planet is actually a mere billion years younger than the universe. We know its mass, and we know that it orbits around a very old object, but it might have formed a mere hundred million years ago and been captured by the pulsar.
This article is based on speculation and gross exaggeration.
It appears to have formed 12.7 billion years ago, within a billion years of the origin of the universe in the theorized Big Bang.
Dr. Alan P. Boss, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, who was not involved in the research, called the discovery a "stunning revelation" that will force scientists to revise their ideas of planetary formation.
Does that mean he's not a real astrophysicist? Does it mean that scientists who claim their ideas as fact have to reinvent their facts? I wonder if the ever changing face of science has caused disbelief in absolute truth.
RE: My subject line- I'll change my theory when theoretical scientists retheorize the age of the universe to be a function of the age of God + 1 year that is.
Finding gas giants, big deal. If they want to impress me they should try to find Chulak.
I try to make everyone's day a little more surreal.
You people know WAY too much about this stuff :-\
Zoltan!
While there is no evidence of a life supporting planet inside the aged gas giant's orbit, scientists feel the possiblity is compelling. "Some may call it wild speculation," says Dr. Astro, "but I feel this might be the hard concrete proof of ancient alien life we've been looking for. In our field of study, 'possible' and 'probable' are one in the same. In fact, I'm positive there was a planet populated with beatiful green-skined women, where astronomers were revered as gods."
Check the slashboxes for new and exciting articles and submit.
This was posted last night to the Hubble Site Slashbox.
Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. -FB
Who else read that headline, 'Oldest *Patent* Ever Discovered?' I admit that the 'space' icon is a bit of a tip-off, but still: I was waiting for some litigous Australopithicus-run hole-in-the-jungle-wall to start firing off cease-and-desists at, eg, string manufacturers.
- undoware.ca
The momentum carried with this matter caused the neutron star to "spin-up" and re-awaken as a millisecond pulsar. Meanwhile, the planet continued on its leisurely orbit at a distance of about 2 billion miles from the pair (approximately the same distance Uranus is from our Sun).
Must be that goats.cx guy, My anus is only about 93,000,000 miles from the sun...
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
blarg.
Now THAT'S funny!
Wouldn't that be the oldest planet to date? I seriously doubt that they believe they've found the oldest planet in all of the universe..
My friend modifier is set to +6, so your score was 5, Troll. :-)
Perhaps those planets are actually younger than our solar system.
Suppose our universe is the surface of a 4 dimensional sphere.
Now aim hubble along a longitude line. Eventually it should be able to see "the other side of the universe". If you increase the scan length beyond this, you'll start to see stars and planets that are actually closer to us (from the other direction) even though Hubble will say they're farther away. In essense, these planets will appear older than they are because light will take longer to get here.
How would we know that something like this isn't going on? For all we know, some of those solar systems we've been seeing other there with jupiter sized planets might be our own.
By way of contrast, history in the Urantia Book goes back almost a trillion years.
One -How do we know this is a rocky planet? Ever heard of Juptier, Saturn- gaseous planets. If a star made of hydrogen formed, would it then be unsual for a lower mass gas planet to form as well Two- How do we know how old universe is? Educated guess? If heavy elements like silicon lead, Uranium need to be formed in stars and considering that our star is projected to have life of 10 billion years before it supernova, wouldn't it take longer for heavy elements to formed and then be reaccummulated into new star systems. Thus increasing the life of the universe? Three- How are we certain where the universe began? since matter cannot travel faster light, would not all the radiation emitted from the big bang have passed us by now? So, where is the indicator that tells that where it originated? With theory built upon theory, is there a chance we may get something wrong in the process? Would laymen really be able to pick it up on it?
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Well it has to be believable, or she won't buy it ...
... and 6000 years is just too unbelievable for a monkey like me.
Seriously, Don't take anything I say seriously.
Indeed, it's not that surprising that it's older than the universe. This universe.
Soon enough, they'll find a planet that's even younger than the universe. That's how fast science is progessing.
http://mediagoblin.org/
Scorpius planet fined for orbiting with an expired orbit license.
paintball
This might be true for distant galaxies, but this is a planet in our own Milky Way, and even if what you say is true, it wouldn't seem that the wraparound would occur over such a short (cosmically short anyway) distance.
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
It is possible that this "planet" started out as a brown dwarf, but had its gaseous "atmosphere" blown away by the nova that created the pulsar. IOW, it just may be nothing more than the left-over core of a brown dwarf. I suppose you could call that a "planet", but not in the sense that we are used to.
How close was this thing to its exploding parent star?
Table-ized A.I.
Subtle. Nice one.
"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
The article dose not mention how they descoverd it's age. I would be realy curius to know this. I mean at this range you are estimating the chemical composition based on very limited data.
Even calculating the mass is acomplish by mesuring the woble induced of nearby objects. The actual size is not known at all.
So my question is. How did they figure out the age and what makes them think they have it right?
PS: Anyone who has used carbon dateing knows that sometimes trusted sientific methods can screw up badly enogh to be replaced wholesale. Whatever was employd here had to me fairly revolutionary.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank.
-- Scotty.
I don't have the Science article, unfortunately, but none of the coverage is very explicit about how the age of this planet was determined. Might it not have been formed more recently, and isn't that in fact much more likely? In which case, it may say nothing about the ability of planets to form in the early universe, or with small quantities of heavy elements.