Newly Discovered EXOPLANETS Are 13 Billion Years-Old. Big Bang Levels Of Old.

A mere 375 light-years away lurks the star  HIP 11952 and its two planets. These days exoplanets are a dime a goddamn dozen, but these two are a bit on the special tip. Using their brain-cannons to calculate and tabulate, people smarter than me have dated these two pigs at nearly the same age as the Big Bang.

io9:

While HIP 11952 is just 375 light-years away, we can determine just how ancient it is by studying the relative abundance of different elements found n the star. While HIP 11952 has lots of hydrogen and helium, it has almost no elements heavier than those two, which means it’s a metal-poor star. Such stars aren’t great candidates to support planets because you need heavier elements to build planets, but it’s not totally unknown – of the 750 or so confirmed exoplanets, a handful are found around metal-poor stars.

Where it gets really remarkable is just how old HIP 11952 must be. As a rule, metal-poor stars formed in the early days of the universe, before stellar processes had forged all the heavier elements. According to the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, which discovered the two Jupiter-sized planets while conducting a survey of these stars, HIP 11952 is particularly old, likely dating back to 13 billion years ago, only just over a billion years after the Big Bang.

Oh shit! Two old as exoplanets. Just hanging around, being old as fuck. Poor of metal, but strong of spirit. I’m…not really sure where I’m going with this.