Oldest Planet Ever Discovered 370
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"
universe age (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:universe age (Score:4, Informative)
We have the bacground radiaton wich decays with time. Knowing the speed of the universes expanse and knowing the decay of the background radiation we can do the math. Caution: I might beterribly wrong here but thats how I remember and since Im at work right now I dont want to google it out...
Good Luck,
Lispy
Cosmic Microwave Background (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cosmic Microwave Background (Score:4, Insightful)
this means our universe, the universe we call home.
but what we don't know yet, and from what I understand this is still under debate, or maybe we'll never know for sure, is whether we will one day say
"this universe"
as opposed to all of the other universes, past, present and future.
I like this concept; it's kind of cool.
I would imagine that the composition of this planet would be different from the composition of our planet, provided that the globular cluster has less "recycled" supernova remnants. Or is it possible that there had already been supernova explosions prior to the time the planet was formed? Or is this some complex interrelationsip between the white dwarf, the pulsar, and the planet? Some strange type of accretion or something? If that planet contains heavier elements, then maybe it's artificially manufactured by intelligent beings! It would be cool to check it out.
Re:Cosmic Microwave Background (Score:3, Interesting)
The Universe means the system that completely encloses all of our interactions and experiences. If we find something, it cannot not be within our Universe, as we could not interact with it. Therefore even if other Universes 'exist', they cannot exist within our experience.
Re:Cosmic Microwave Background (Score:4, Interesting)
Daniel
Re:Cosmic Microwave Background (Score:3, Interesting)
That hurts my head just thinking about it. So let me ask you this, if we discover it's theoretically possible to break one of the fundamental laws of physics, and do so, does the parallel universe spiral into oblivion (as we probably would also)?
Re:Cosmic Microwave Background (Score:2)
If you find out you can break one of the laws, that means you didn't understand what the law was. Not that the reality police are going to pull you over for performing an unsafe manouver in an unregistered universe...
Re:Cosmic Microwave Background (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cosmic Microwave Background (Score:4, Insightful)
That's just an exercise in quasi-philosophical tautology. The two situations, (i)our Universe is unique and obeys the Physics we observe, (ii)our Universe is one of many, and obeys the Physics we observe, are completely identical within the realm of experiment. To argue whether one or the other is the true situation is like trying to argue whether or not the Universe is a computer sim; every piece of 'evidence' for one case is identically 'evidence' for the other.
Re:Cosmic Microwave Background (Score:3, Informative)
-T
Re:Cosmic Microwave Background (Score:2, Funny)
We can make educated guesses, but in the end we're better off guessing low. I wouldn't say The universe is 13.7 billion years old, plus or minus 200 million years. I would say she doesn't look a day over 8 million years old....and then change the subject.
It´s easy (Score:2)
cu,
Lispy
Re:universe age (Score:5, Interesting)
How to tell the age of the universe (Score:4, Informative)
It is mentioned in the Bible ... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It is mentioned in the Bible ... (Score:2)
Re:universe age (Score:4, Funny)
Simple. They cut it in half and count the rings....
Re:universe age (Score:3)
Having taken one semester of astrophysics... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Having taken one semester of astrophysics... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Having taken one semester of astrophysics... (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't read the second (Hubble) article. The entire star spins 100 times per second? I would think that this star (any star) would be pretty big, so is that possible? I would think that means it's surface would be going faster than light. Am I misunderstanding something?
Re:Having taken one semester of astrophysics... (Score:5, Informative)
Pulsars are nutron stars (collapsed due to gravity to the point of overcoming the repulsive force between atoms, so the nucleus of the atoms are smashed together, extremely high density matter just short of a black hole in density) where the angular velocity of the entire system is packed into a tiny space (meters or a few kilometers across).
Since it still has a magnetic field too, there is a "beam" of photons that get channeled out away at the poles, sorta like a flashlight spun on a string.
If earth is in the beam, we see a "pulse" of light energy coming from the star. (There's a proably a bunch we do not see as they do not point at us at any time during the spin.)
Counting the pulses tells you how fast the star is spinning and to a certain extent it's age (as the pulse slows down over astronomical time).
Since the spin has a lot of angular momentum (A LOT) it is extremely regular, and serves as a nice clock to use against stuff going on around the pulsar and between us and it. (Think atomic clock to synch GPS with, same concept.)
Or something like that.
Re:Having taken one semester of astrophysics... (Score:3, Informative)
So the angular momentum remains the same, but because the star has such a smaller diamter (hecnce lower rotational inertia....a
Re:Having taken one semester of astrophysics... (Score:3, Informative)
Nope. [enchantedlearning.com] When stars the size of our sun collapse, they turn into white dwarves. In order to become a neutron star, you need to start with a star with a mass between 1.5 to 3 times the mass of our sun. To reach black hole stage, you need to start with a star with a mass more than 3 times our sun.
-T
Re:Having taken one semester of astrophysics... (Score:2)
I'm sorry.
Re:Having taken one semester of astrophysics... (Score:5, Informative)
But, the really interesting part of this paper is that since they now have directly observed the white dwarf around the pulsar, they can measure its colors and infer it's age. Previously, there were two leading theories... 1. That there was a pre-existing pulsar-white dwarf binary and then the planet was captured from it's orbit around a star which passed by the pulsary-white dwarf binary. -or- 2. There was a pulsar-star binary which interacted with a star-planet binary, kicked out the original star, replacing the old stellar companion with the new star, and leaving the planet in a wide orbit. The new star evolved, expanded, transfered mass onto the pulsar, spun up it's rotational speed, became a white dwarf, and circularized it's orbit around the pulsar. The planet stuck around in a wider orbit and perturbed the inner binary slightly, imparting a small eccentricty to the pulsar-white dwarf binary.
Since we now know the white dwarf is young, scenario 2 is vastly more likely, and so we now better understand the formation mechanism for this system. That's the real news behind this discovery.
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.
Re:Having taken one semester of astrophysics... (Score:2)
Not necessarily! (Score:2)
Not necessarily, a true geek would sleep through astronomy class. Well, most of it anyway - but only upon hearing the words "binary star system"
Re:Having taken one semester of astrophysics... (Score:2)
Re:Having taken one semester of astrophysics... (Score:5, Informative)
The thing to realise for the non-initiated here is that stars move around the H-R diagram throughout their life-time, as they form, expand into red dwarfs, blow away their outer shells, shrink into white dwarfs, etc. Through all this their temperature varies and their luminosity (which is largely dependent on their size, which changes vastly between, say, a star like the sun and the same star 5 billion years later when it's turned into a red giant) varies too.
However the vast majority of the stars in a cluster of average age will be stuck on a line which represents what is called the "main sequence", which is what our sun is on. Where they are on the line depends on their starting mass. Stars stay on the main sequence longer if they are lighter (heavy stars have much shorter lives), so there is a "turn-off" point on the main sequence line (a point where the stars move off the main sequence into the red giant phase) which can be used to evaluate the age of the cluster, assuming all the stars formed at roughly the same time.
Daniel
Re:Having taken one semester of astrophysics... (Score:4, Informative)
The PDF of the full paper is available from the website of Stephen Torsett [thorsett.org], one of the authors of the paper. As this is a Science [sciencemag.org] paper, it is fairly readable.
Re:Having taken one semester of astrophysics... (Score:2)
This is NOT some Cal Tech astrophysics dept release. This was a press release DESINGNED for the casual reader, so obviously it is not very detailed. Mainstream scientific articles are usually written without the advanced scientific details (which, for some reason, you decide to label as "dumbed down to the max"). I am a medical student, and we often have to read the original New England Journal of Med articles about "mainstream" medical stories. Let me tel
Re:Having taken one semester of astrophysics... (Score:5, Funny)
It's a four step process.
Re:Having taken one semester of astrophysics... (Score:4, Funny)
A planet younger than the universe? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A planet younger than the universe? (Score:2)
since I live on planet Earth, I am younger than the universe too!! I can't believe it!
In case of slashdotting - full text of report (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:In case of slashdotting - full text of report (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In case of slashdotting - full text of report (Score:5, Funny)
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...
Just kidding.
Re:In case of slashdotting - full text of report (Score:2, Funny)
Re:In case of slashdotting - follow my sig (Score:2, Interesting)
Heavy elements (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Heavy elements (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Heavy elements (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody is purporting that the big bang theory or anything based off of it is fact. Anyone who believes it as fact is deluding themselves. But its a damn good explaination based on observations. This is the definition of science, is
Re:Heavy elements (Score:2, Interesting)
Sounds kinda sneaky, but that's always the way I hav
Re:Heavy elements (Score:2)
'Almost certainly'? I love how astrophysists base their hypotheses on theories that are so far from being conclusively proven that it's ridiculous.
Such is science, all science.
There is no such animal in science as a theory that has been "conclusively proven". You want conclusive proofs, guarantees of truth and falsehood, go to mathematics (and steer clear of fundamental Set Theory while you're there)
First off, how do we know that the Universe is 13 billion years (or whatever?) We don't.
Re:Heavy elements (Score:5, Informative)
It is odd, but not completely unexpected.
Re:Heavy elements (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Heavy elements (Score:3, Interesting)
Not necessarily (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not necessarily (Score:2)
Second, the hypothesis that it formed via direct collapse from the disk, would be consistant with it being nearly all gaseous. However, most scientists beleice that the planets in our solar system formed by first accreting a bunch of rocky material to form a core which then accumulated a bunch of gas. Doing that in a low metallicity disk seems like it might be a bit difficult. But I expect others will try to
Re:Heavy elements and eating into the timeframe (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, they're begging the question somewhat, but it seems true that globular clusters metal deficient [uq.edu.au]. 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 [fofweb.com].
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...
Re:Heavy elements (Score:3, Interesting)
High-mass stars are very short-lived, and one can expect that the first supernova goes off within a few 100000 years (most heavy elements are from supernovae). It will take a lot of time to completely mix the heavy elements with the rest of the interstellar gas, but at least some small regions will become enriched with heavy elements rather quickly.
I understand now... (Score:5, Funny)
Go back to your planet Darl!
Re:I understand now... (Score:2, Funny)
Any article that has the letter sequence of "SCO" can be turned into a joke for an automatic SCOre of +5 Funny.
Hahaha! +5 Funny!
Not ready for /. (Score:2)
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.
Detecting planets. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Detecting planets. (Score:5, Informative)
Normal planetary systems (Score:3, Interesting)
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 hoo
Re:Detecting planets. (Score:5, Informative)
Second, there are several projects planned, like the 'Darwin' project of the European Space Agency (ESA) that will specifically target earth-like planets. Here [space.com] is a short description of Darwin, and links to some other projects.
I wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
Would they conclude that it was unlikely that life could evolve in this system for one reason or another based upon their own standards?
Re:I wonder... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
If they did then they are an incredibly short sighted race, so much so that they probably wouldn't have got much beyond "banging the rocks together", let alone to radio astronomy. We are detecting Jupiter sized planets with a growing regularity, yet do we conclude from this that there are no other Earth type planets in the same star system, located in the zone necessary
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
There are several planetary systems that we have discovered that have been ruled out as having evolved life as we know it.
The system in the article is a prime example.
The x-ray emissions from the pulsar would prevent life as we know it from ever starting, much less evolving.
Those are our standards. We have only ourselves as a basis for comparison.
Perhaps there are very alien forms of intelligent life that would not consider our system capable of supporting biology because we lack a strong x-ray source.
Re:I wonder... (Score:2)
Re:I wonder... (Score:2)
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
To detect our sun's wobble, the other civilizations would have to understand the concepts of space and time. I think it is unlikely that extraterrestrial beings think in such categories.
I mean, we humans already know (from quantum mechanics) that the concepts of space and time are of limited value as models of reality, although we cannot escape the way our brains are hardwired. Ex
Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Insightful)
> are of limited value as models of reality, although we cannot escape the way our brains
> are hardwired. Extraterrestrials will probably think in completely different categories, which
> are as much beyond our imagination as space and time are to them.
I think it is a fairly model independent assumption to say that any intelligent lifeform must be rather complex and therefore orders of magnitudes larger than the typical quantum mechanical regime of atoms and molecules.
To be able to have a level of consciousness it is also a fairly safe assumption that the physical proportions of a being ('s "brain") must be small enough that the speed of light doesnt seriously restrict the exchange of information between the various parts of the brain.
Therefore any (or at the very least, most) intelligent life should exist in a regime where the classic concepts of space and time are an EXCELLENT approximation to reality.
Why you think it is UNLIKELY that they would think in concepts of space and time* is beyond me.
*:there is btw. nothing wrong with the concepts of space and time. For instance time is NOT just a "fourth dimension" as some folks believe. And QM doesnt discard space and time.
from-a-physicist-who-is-tired-of-the-ravings-of
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
Read again what I wrote. I have said nothing about how aliens think, but about the categories they do not think in.
Re:I wonder... (Score:2)
Space-time is just one out of a very large number of ways to perceive reality. Therefore, it is unlikely that aliens would think in the same way as us. That would be a rather great coincidence.
Six... (Score:2)
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".
earth's instruments can't detect a Jupiter yet (Score:3, Informative)
Space-based woble methods may give a lot more detectibility because they avoid atmospheric blurring. Also a new satelli
Obvious Name Suggestion: (Score:2, Funny)
Planet or Brown Dwarf (Score:5, Funny)
Oldest planet (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Oldest planet (Score:3, Funny)
actually the Imperial Death Star is located near Redmond, WA.
Re:Oldest planet (Score:2)
Re:Oldest planet (Score:2)
how would they know it had any heavy elements? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:how would they know it had any heavy elements? (Score:3, Interesting)
The planet almost certainly formed before the pulsar went supernova.
younger than the universe (Score:3, Funny)
it's just slighly (~1 billion years) younger than the universe itself
Is it just me or should that read older
Re:younger than the universe (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:*Was* the oldest (Score:5, Informative)
well... (Score:3, Funny)
Billion...? (Score:2)
And isn't it about time something was done to stop this confusion?
Re:Billion...? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
A new twist on an old concept (Score:2, Funny)
When does a planet become a star? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:When does a planet become a star? (Score:3, Interesting)
Astronomers are having discussions about this right now. It is not entirely clear to me what the final definition will be. The current leading candidate for the brown dwarf/planet dividing line is how they form.
That's no planet (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
It's astonishing what we can do these days (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Been reading too much slashdot when.. (Score:4, Funny)
Saying Never (Score:2, Insightful)
Goes to show you that even if the probability of something happening is (se
The Shadows! (Score:3)
Leave my planet alone!!!! (Score:2)
Space Monkey (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:RTFT... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Oldest for now. (Score:5, Informative)
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