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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"
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?
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Crudely Drawn Games
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.
You judge the age of fairly close objects, using nuclear models, compare with red shifts. Then you look at the red shift of far away objects and try to extrapolate age, IIRC.
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Crudely Drawn Games
Would they conclude that it was unlikely that life could evolve in this system for one reason or another based upon their own standards?
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.
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
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.
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.
They could exist theoretically, and they could even have consequences on our universe. For instance, if the fundamental laws of physics are symmetrical to the extreme then we might find that each possible law exists in some parallel universe (meaning all possible universes with all possible combinations and variations on the laws of physics exist). None of these other universes would be anything we could interact with, yet they determine (by the particular combination of laws that they don't contain) the fundamental laws of our universe.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
There's a difference between the laws of physics and the theoretical laws of physics. The laws of physics are unbreakable exactly because that is what we mean by a law of physics: if it can be broken, then it wasn't a law of physics in the first place. If we find it possible to break a theoretical law, it will simply point us in the direction of a deeper theory, which may or may not agree with the actual laws of physics.