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| The ancient solar system Kepler-444 |
A newly discovered solar system — with five small rocky planets — makes ours look like a baby.
An international team of astronomers announced Tuesday that this
extrasolar system is 11.2 billion years old. With the age of the
universe pegged at 13.8 billion years, this is the oldest star with
close-to-Earth-size planets ever found.
By comparison, our solar system is 4.5 billion years old.
The five planets are smaller than Earth, with the largest about the
size of Venus and the smallest just bigger than Mercury. These planets
orbit their star in less than 10 days at less than one-tenth the Earth’s
distance from the sun, which makes them too close for habitation, said
the University of Sydney’s Daniel Huber, part of the team.
“We’ve never seen anything like this — it is such an old star and
the large number of small planets make it very special,” Huber said in a
statement. “It is extraordinary that such an ancient system of
terrestrial-sized planets formed when the universe was just starting
out, at a fifth its current age.”
Lead researcher Tiago Campante of the University of Birmingham in
England noted in a statement that by now knowing close-to-Earth-size
planets formed so long ago, that “could provide scope for the existence
of ancient life in the galaxy.”
Campante, an asteroseismologist, measured oscillations from the star to determine the age and size of this compact system.
NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft was used to make the
observations over a four-year period. Thus, the bright sunlike star at
the heart of this system is named Kepler-444. It’s in the Constellation
Lyre.
The team represented scientists from Europe, Australia and the United
States. Their findings were reported in the latest edition of the
Astrophysical Journal.
Source Article from http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AscensionEarth2012/~3/atKXuNwBF5w/astronomers-find-ancient-solar-system.html
Astronomers find ancient solar system more than double ours in age
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