What was the first planet found beyond our solar system? Astro-geeks usually cite the discovery of the Jupiter-mass planet circling the naked-eye star 51 Pegasi in 1995. But the truth is far stranger. Three years earlier, astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail announced they had found not one but two planets — and these orbited the oddest kind of star in the universe, a millisecond pulsar.
Its name is PSR B1257+12, and it lies in the constellation Virgo the Virgin at a distance of 980 light-years. It spins 161 times a second and, like all pulsars, is a neutron star, the smallest and densest visible object in the universe.
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