 Artist's Drawing of the Gas Giant
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July 11, 2003 — Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope said Thursday they had discovered the oldest-known planet, a Jupiter-sized body billions of years older than the Earth orbiting a pair of burned-out stars.
The planet, which takes a century to orbit its dead suns, lies at the core of the ancient globular star cluster M4, located 5,600 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius, NASA said.
Astronomers estimate it was formed 13 billion years ago — just a billion years after the universe formed and long before the Earth or its sun existed — and has a mass about 2.5 times that of Jupiter.
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The planet's existence has been the object of debate since its star was first discovered in 1988 in an area of the Milky Way galaxy thought to be too old for planets to have formed. A team of researchers using Hubble data were recently able to confirm its status as a planet and measure its mass.
"Our Hubble measurement offers tantalizing evidence that planet formation processes are quite robust and efficient at making use of a small amount of heavier elements. This implies that planet formation happened very early in the universe," said Steinn Sigurdsson of Pennsylvania State University, one of the researchers.
Researchers believe the planet, like Jupiter, is a gas giant, unable to support life because it lacks sufficient amounts of carbon and oxygen. The planet also has survived the blistering ultraviolet radiation, supernova radiation, and shockwaves from the birth and death of the stars in the cluster around it, NASA said.
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