BillRoh
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This will shake some things up -12 billion year old planet
« on: 2003-07-11 00:29:26 » |
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I don't know about you folks, but this makes me rething the intelligent life in space thing - with us being the new kids on the block. Metal rich planets 7 or 8 billion years older than earth? Holy Squid DooDoo!
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/07/10/ancient.planet.ap/index.html
Here's an excerpt:
Thursday, July 10, 2003 Posted: 10:45 PM EDT (0245 GMT)
WASHINGTON (AP)
"Steinn Sigurdsson, a professor of astronomy at Pennsylvania State University, said that based on orbital measurements and other data, astronomers can infer a history for the M4 planet.
He said it is believed the planet formed about a sunlike star near the edge of the globular cluster. Over time, the star and its planet were gravitationally captured by the pulsar, which was then a neutron star with another star as a companion. As the sunlike star was sucked into the mix, the companion star was ejected from the group. This left the sunlike star and neutron star bound to each other while the planet orbited both.
Eventually, the sunlike star burned up its fuel, bloomed into a red giant and then collapsed into a white dwarf. The neutron star, with its greater density, sucked in material from the collapsing star. This caused the neutron star to start spinning at 100 times a second and emitting radio signals, turning into a pulsar. It was the clocklike pulsing of these radio signals, picked up by radio telescopes, that led to other observations and the discovery of the complex.
Sigurdsson said there were enough heavy elements in the M4 complex to have formed some terrestrial planets, like Earth and Mars, in orbit of the sunlike star. He said it is theoretically possible that life could have formed on those planets some 12.5 billion years ago."
Best to all
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