July 12, 2003	Saturday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 11, 1424

WASHINGTON: The oldest planet ever detected is nearly 13 billion years old and more than twice the size of Jupiter, locked in orbit around a whirling pulsar and a white dwarf, astronomers said on Thursday.

Compared with the relative youth and stability of our own celestial neighbourhood, where Earth and the other planets orbit a single 5-billion-year-old star in a quiet neighbourhood of the Milky Way, the ancient group that holds the oldest planet has had a boisterous past, scientists said at a NASA briefing.

The planet is located near the heart of a globular star cluster some 5,600 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius. Globular clusters were generally thought to be lousy environments for forming planets, because the clusters coalesced so early in the universe’s development that the heavier elements needed to make planets were not yet present in abundance..—Reuters