A former Brineller made number 11 out of Discover magazine's top 100 science stories of 2003, listed in the January 2004 issue. At first, scientists thought that an object orbiting a pulsar in globular cluster M4 was simply a small star or brown dwarf. Steinn Sigurdsson and his colleagues at Pennsylvania State University determined that it is actually the oldest and most distant known planet in the universe, formed 12.7 billion years ago, only about one billion years after the Big Bang. The planet is a gas giant over twice the mass of Jupiter, currently orbiting a pulsar after a long, complicated history of switching dance partners. :-) The discovery suggests that life could have evolved 5 or 6 billion years earlier than anyone expected.
Discover's web site won't show this issue online for a few months, but Steinn's site has more information about the discovery:
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