THE oldest, most distant planet yet known has been discovered orbiting a pair of burnt-out stars 5600 light years from Earth.
The planet, a gas giant 2.5 times the diameter of Jupiter, has been named Methuselah after the immensely old biblical patriarch. It orbits its twin stars once a century, says an international team based at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
At 13 billion years old, the planet is 8.5 billion years older than Earth. Proof of its existence, from images taken by the Hubble telescope, is evidence that some planets formed within a billion years of…
