The Old Ones were already ancient when Earth was born. Five small planets orbit an 11.2-billion-year-old star, making them about 80 per cent as old as the universe itself. "Now that we know that these planets can be twice as old as Earth, this opens the possibility for the existence of ancient life in the galaxy," says Tiago Campante at the University of Birmingham in the UK. NASA's Kepler space telescope spotted the planets around an orange dwarf star called Kepler-444, which is 117 light years away and about 25 per cent smaller than the sun.
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