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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"
How do they know the universe is 14.7 billion years old?
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
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
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.
NASA has found the oldest known planet in a globular star cluster in the constellation SCOrpius.
Go back to your planet Darl!
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..
Perhaps he read the title ((oldest planet ever) discovered), instead of ((oldest planet) (ever discovered)).
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
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
Karma: Bad due to google bombing - Robert Watkins woz 'ere.
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.
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's just slighly (~1 billion years) younger than the universe itself
Is it just me or should that read older
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Great. NASA found Z'ha'dum --the last place we should send explorers!
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
It's 10^9 of course. The universe is about 14*10^9 years old, so it cannot be 10^12.
I agree that one should stop the confusion about what billion or trillion actually mean, though.
In German a billion is 10^12 and a trillion is 10^18. In English it's 10^9 and 10^12. Don't know how other languages handle this.
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.
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?
Not necessarily -- or at least not for that reason. Remember that this is about as old as a planet can be, as it was formed when the universe was still quite young.
For a planet to form, there must already have been stars going supernova to create the materials the planet forms for. And this star material must also gather in large enough concentrations close to a gravity well (i.e. a star or another planet).
Finally, the gravity well it revolves around must be extremely long-lived for it to still exist -- alternatively, it must be at the "other side" of the universe, where we see it as it existed back then, with the probability that it no longer exists when we see it.
Yes, I believe we will find more old planets, but not primarily because of improvements in technology, but because the universe is frigging huge, with zillions of possible old planets.
Not MUCH older than this one, though.
Regards,
--
*Art
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.