First Exoplanets Found Orbiting Dead Star Remnant

About this episode

The episode discusses the groundbreaking discovery of the first confirmed exoplanets orbiting a pulsar, made by astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail in 1992.

# The Discovery of Pulsar Planets: May 4th in Science History On **May 4, 1992**, astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail made an announcement that would shake the foundations of planetary science: they had discovered the first confirmed planets outside our solar system. But these weren't just any exoplanets—they were orbiting a *pulsar*, one of the strangest objects in the universe. The discovery, published in the journal *Nature*, identified two planets (later a third would be confirmed) orbiting PSR B1257+12, a pulsar located about 2,300 light-years away in the constellation Virgo. This was absolutely mind-blowing for several reasons. First, let's talk about what makes this so weird. A pulsar is the rapidly spinning remnant of a massive star that exploded in a supernova. Picture a ball of neutrons about 20 kilometers across, spinning hundreds of times per second, with a magnetic field a trillion times stronger than Earth's, shooting beams of radiation into space like a cosmic lighthouse. It's essentially a stellar corpse. The idea that planets could survive—or even *form*—around such a violent object seemed almost absurd. Wolszczan, working at the Arecibo Observatory…

Topics covered

• exoplanets
• pulsars
• astronomy
• planetary science
• space exploration

Keywords

• exoplanets
• pulsar
• astronomy
• Wolszczan
• Frail
• Nature
• PSR B1257+12
• discovery
• space

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Arecibo Observatory

Books & works: Nature

Places: Virgo, Puerto Rico, Earth, 2,300 light-years, PSR B1257+12

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