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Hey Whyville! I logged onto MSN messenger today, and this annoying news-ish
thing popped up when I fully logged on. Usually, I don't give these things much
time, but something caught my eye. It said, "13 billion year old planet
discovered." This got me interested, and I clicked the link, which brought me to
an article. I got pretty interested after reading it, and did more research, and
now I'm writing this article. Enjoy!
This planet, astronomers say, is twice the size of Jupiter. Jupiter is 318
times as large as the earth, with an equator of 142,984 km. Think about that
and let it sink in. There's a 13 billion year old planet that's 2x the size of
the our solar system's largest planet, and they just now discovered it? It seems
a planet with an equator 285,968 km would be hard to hide, but take into consideration that
it's 5600 light years away from Earth. One light year is about 9,460,000,000,000
km. Now, think about that one!
After I discovered this fact, I wondered how scientists ever found this thing in the first
place. To find out, I did more research. From what I understand, before the
astronomers
and scientists found this planet in through the Hubble Space Telescope, they
discovered a pulsar and a white dwarf star. For those of you who don't know, a pulsar
is a neutron star spinning seriously fast, and a white dwarf star is a star with
low mass, small size, and average or below average luminosity (aka
brightness), that happens to
be white. Anyway, this planet is locked in orbit around these two stars, and
when scientists observed these three dancing objects in the sky, they
determined that one was really a planet.
Dr Sigurdsson of Pennsylvania State University says, "We think this planet
formed with its star 12.713 billion years ago when the [Milky Way] galaxy was
very young, just in the process of forming." So, basically, he's saying this
planet is as old as our galaxy. In another article I read about this topic, it
said that this planet is as old as the entire universe. Whatever the case may
be, the planet they found is still really old!
Globular clusters (places where stars are so close together they're forced to
interact) were once thought to be inadequate places for forming planets,
because the clusters fused together so long ago that the heavier elements needed to make planets
were not around at that time in large amounts. After the discovery of this
planet, that theory was proven to be wrong, and new theories are being created.
It's all kind of a complicated guesswork.
 The picture I put in is the nearest globular cluster to
Earth. You can see that the stars are very close in the center of the picture.
If you can't see it, then imagine what you would see looking up at the sky, then
put in lots of stars in the center of the image. That's what a globular cluster
looks like.
Another fact I found interesting was how they figured out the mass of this
planet. Because the planet is too far away to look at directly, they relied on measuring
the force of gravity the pulsar and dwarf star had on the planet, and vice versa. I just thought
you might want to know that.
You probably think that these scientists and astronomers are good at what they
do after reading this article, but also keep in mind that this is just one of
one hundred planets they found outside the Milky Way, so this is pretty much just a day's
work for them.
Well, that's all I have to say. Y-mail me if I got anything wrong
or if you want more information.
Timantha
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