Planet-Making Recipe May be Easy to Whip Up
(From the September/October 2003 issue of StarDate
magazine)
The oldest planet yet discovered (shown at top) orbits a pair of “dead” stars in the globular cluster M4, as seen in this artist’s concept. The planet, which was discovered with Hubble Space Telescope, is about 13 billion years old. It’s about twice as massive as Jupiter, which means it’s probably a gas giant. Because the stars of M4 contain little of the heavy elements required to make planets, the existence of this world implies that planet formation may have been common in the early universe, according to the scientists who discovered the planet.
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