Time is a funny, vast thing. More vast than funny, really. It’s not within the human mind’s capacity to actually understand that kind of vastness. In fact, if you cut time from beginning to now into 13.7 million chunks, our minds couldn’t even fathom a single chunk. I mean, that’s a thousand years per chunk. Too vast.

But in that vastness, we were formed. From some point in time, we started to form. Whether you think of that as the bubbling soup of organic molecules, the formation of the earth or the beginning of the Big Bang, either way, they’re all too far away to fathom.

But it’s safe to say we started off quite a while ago. Our planet is about 4.543 billion years old. Again, pointless to add that many decimal places, but whatever. It’s a bloody old planet ok?

In that time, Earth has been pummeled by asteroids, comets and other planets, it’s been ravaged by solar winds, radioactive flares and magnetic anomalies billions of lightyears away (more on that on a later post), and its own insides have been vomiting out onto its surface for billions of years, melting away anything it touching. Then somehow living organisms managed to go from one cell to two cells, then elephants. I think that’s how evolution works anyway.

All in 4.5 billion years. But how long does it actually take for a planet to form?
The answer is classically scientific: We don’t know.

A lot of it depends on the type of planet, but there are also a lot of weird things we currently don’t get, like how gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn are discovered right up close to their host star, when as far as we know, they can only be formed far, far away like the orbit of Jupiter and Saturn.

As for earth, estimates range from 10-100 million years to form, as in from 4.6-4.5 billion years, but then there was the additional LHB (Late Heavy Bombardment), a time where a huge amount of asteroids attacked our inner planets, adding lots more mass and ingredients to the mix.

But a planet can’t just form from nothing. It needs a host star, and they take 100,000 years for a massive star, but more typically about 10 million years to form.

Earth is not an old or a young planet, really. Just a normal planet. There are way, way older planets. One in particular is confusingly old. It’s time to introduce you to PSR B1620-26 b, The Genesis Planet.

Genesis

Genesis, as I’ll call it for lazy’s sake, is an exoplanet 2.5 times the mass of Jupiter, 12,400 lightyears away, orbiting TWO stars. Yep, that’s a thing. In fact, there are different combinations of this but Genesis follows this orbit:

At 12,400 lightyears away, it’s not a good contender for visiting. I mean, that would take, with current technology, 461,280,000 years to get to. Even if we impossibly managed to reach light speed, it would still take us, well… 12,400 years (And FYI, that’s not even outside of our galaxy).

But Genesis is interesting for a whole different reason than its habitability. Its age is baffling. With an estimated age of 13 billion years old, it’s almost as old as the Universe itself.

Is this possible?

The oldest possible

Well, WMAP, a mission by NASA to probe the temperatures across the night sky to gather an image of the Universe, found that the earliest stars only started to form about 200 million years after the big bang. With the Universe estimated at around 13.7 billion years of age, that puts the earliest stars at 13.5 billion years in the past.

Not only does this mean that the 13 billion year old Genesis had to come into existence only 500 million years after everything was nothing, but it also had to continue to exist this whole time and continue to this day (Well, at least until 12,400 years ago, since we can only observe the light that has traveled in that time, but I bet it’s still around now).

That might be ok but it also has to depend on two separate stars also surviving the whole time. Our own Sun, by the way, has a lifespan of about 10 billion years. Plenty for now, but for those aliens living on Genesis, time caught up with them. Now the stars are pretty burnt out, just two dead cores orbiting each other. But still there.

Beautifully improbable

What makes the planet even less likely to exist is the fact that it’s in a very unfriendly neighborhood, in the middle of a dense cluster of 100,000 stars.

Globular cluster M4. Clusters form simultaneously; each star here is around 13 billion years old

The thinking goes that, among all the dense collisions, the parent star with Genesis orbiting it managed to kick another star out of place and position itself around a neutron star, creating the circumbinary situation it lives in today. With two stars providing two sunrises and sunsets, anyone standing on its surface would get a rather wonderful, Tatooine-esque experience, with two shadows at any given time.

Even wilder, the neutron star would typically have pulses of radiation at regular intervals, from milliseconds to seconds in duration, you’d have a veritable disco ball in the sky next to your parent star. Pulsars are utterly incredible. I gotta write about those, too.

So PSR B1620-26 b has taught us some valuable lessons. The Universe is rough. Real rough. But even with a constant bombardment of nuclear giants and radiation storms, one can pull through and survive.

It also taught us that in all likelihood, planets are much more abundant in our own galaxy than we initially thought. Things tend to coalesce and form as soon as they physically can, no messing around. Indeed, many scientists are starting to wonder if there are any stars without planets around them.

What other secrets do these exoplanets have in store for us? I’m sure we’ll find out, even if it takes us 13 billion years.

Image Sources:

Circumbinary planet orbits
Globular Clusters
Tatooine

Previously:

Water World
Eyeball Earth
Extreme Exoplanet Weather of Death and Doom