alienation news

Astronomers find oldest, most distant planet

Astronomers said the oldest and most distant planet yet found is a huge, gaseous sphere 13 billion years old and 5,600 light years away, a discovery that could change theories about when planets formed and when life could have evolved.
The planet, more than twice the size of Jupiter, orbits two stars, a pulsar and a white dwarf that linked together about a billion years ago. The system is in the constellation Scorpius within a globular cluster called M4 that contains stars that formed billions of years before the sun and its planets.