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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"

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  1. Re:Having taken one semester of astrophysics... by Jarlsberg · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yup. Here's info from Hubblesite: The story of this planet's discovery began in 1988, when the pulsar, called PSR B1620-26, was discovered in M4. It is a neutron star spinning just under 100 times per second and emitting regular radio pulses like a lighthouse beam. The white dwarf was quickly found through its effect on the clock-like pulsar, as the two stars orbited each other twice per year. Sometime later, astronomers noticed further irregularities in the pulsar that implied that a third object was orbiting the others. This new object was suspected to be a planet, but it could also be a brown dwarf or a low-mass star. Debate over its true identity continued through the 1990s.

  2. Cosmic Microwave Background by Hittite+Creosote · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.