Friday, July 11, 2003
Ancient and most distant planet discovered
Prospects for extraterrestrial life soared yesterday with the discovery of a "Methuselah" planet twice as old and 25 times farther away than any of the 110-plus planets so far found in our Milky Way galaxy.
The discovery means that planets were formed billions of years earlier than generally believed and under bizarre conditions previously dismissed as improbable, even impossible.
Richer and UBC colleague Ingrid Stairs are the Canadian researchers on the international team that announced the discovery in Washington, D.C., yesterday. The planet has been dubbed Methuselah, after the Biblical patriarch who supposedly lived for 969 years.
The positive identification resulted from 15 years detective work with radio telescopes and crucial photographs from the Hubble space telescope.
The extrasolar planet, two-and-a-half times the size of Jupiter, is in a super-dense cluster of stars called M4 located in the distant constellation Scorpius.
It lies in a stellar region dated at 13 billion years, only a billion years younger than the Big Bang that created the universe.
"Life could have arisen there and died out long before we came to the party," said Alan Boss, an extrasolar planet expert on the staff of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C.
Methuselah is 5,600 light years away, compared to a couple of hundred light-years for the most distant extrasolar planet previously discovered.
Its probable age of 13 billion years is double that of any other known planet and almost three times older than Earth, which geologists pin at 4.5 billion years.
"What we think we've found is an example of the first generation of planets formed in the universe," said Steinn Sigurdsson of Pennsylvania State University, co-leader with Richer of the research team.
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