Written by Cassius Methyl, The Anti-Media, February 2, 2015

(ANTIMEDIA) Kepler-444 is an extremely ancient solar system in the Milky Way Galaxy, one of many observed with the Kepler Spacecraft.

On 27 January 2015, the Kepler Spacecraft reportedly “confirmed the detection of five sub-Earth-sized rocky exoplanets orbiting the star.”

This is being perceived as evidence that Earth-like planets with the potential for harboring life were formed in other solar systems as early as 11 billion years ago, as this star was calculated to be 11.2 billion years old using the technique called asteroseismology.

There is an apparent consensus among scientists that life took about 4 billion years to evolve on Earth, and that eventually the evolution of life had run its course for enough time to birth life as intelligent as human beings.

While recognizing that the history of life on Earth is endlessly more complex than that, and that is just a theory, this new info on Kepler-444 majorly alters our perception of how long ago alien life could have appeared. A solar system with multiple Earth sized, rocky planets that is 11.2 billion years old; this may prove to be significant in understanding the nature of solar systems, life, and the possibility of alien civilizations.

However, this solar system probably does not have life itself, as it’s planets are extremely hot.

The 5 planets in Kepler-444 orbit very fast around their star, completing full cycles in between 3 and 7 days. These planets are all very high in temperature, as they are all very close to their star.

“There are far-reaching implications for this discovery,” said Dr. Tiago Campante, an astronomer from the University of Birmingham involved in the discovery. “We now know that Earth-sized planets have formed throughout most of the Universe’s 13.8-billion-year history, which could provide scope for the existence of ancient life in the Galaxy.” he continued.

“Other similarly old planets could indeed harbor life,” Campante also said. “Think about a technologically advanced civilization that has a few billion years head start relative to us!”

A description of Kepler-444 from Wikipedia:

“The chemical composition of stars hosting small exoplanets (with radii less than four Earth radii) appears to be more diverse than that of gas-giant hosts, which tend to be metal-rich. This implies that small, including Earth-size, planets may have readily formed at earlier epochs in the Universe’s history when metals were more scarce.

“We report Kepler spacecraft observations of Kepler-444, a metal-poor Sun-like star from the old population of the Galactic thick disk and the host to a compact system of five transiting planets with sizes between those of Mercury and Venus. We validate this system as a true five-planet system orbiting the target star and provide a detailed characterization of its planetary and orbital parameters based on an analysis of the transit photometry.

“Kepler-444 is the densest star with detected solar-like oscillations. We use asteroseismology to directly measure a precise age of 11.2+/-1.0 Gyr for the host star, indicating that Kepler-444 formed when the Universe was less than 20% of its current age and making it the oldest known system of terrestrial-size planets.

“We thus show that Earth-size planets have formed throughout most of the Universe’s 13.8-billion-year history, leaving open the possibility for the existence of ancient life in the Galaxy. The age of Kepler-444 not only suggests that thick-disk stars were among the hosts to the first Galactic planets, but may also help to pinpoint the beginning of the era of planet formation.”

Please share this with as many people as possible. Some very interesting discoveries about astronomy and the universe have been announced recently.

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