Oldest Material On Earth Is Older Than The Solar System
The stinking Murchinson meteorite from Australia was hiding grains of cosmic dust that were made by a dying star about seven billion years ago.
Image by Monoar Rahman Rony from Pixabay
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The Old And Stinky Meteorite
The Earth and the whole Solar system was created shortly after the Sun ignited from a collapsed cloud of cosmic gas and dust – about four and a half billion years ago. But that doesn't mean nothing on Earth can be older. Scientists recently tracked down the new oldest material on our planet. It got created over seven billion years ago. Obviously, this material doesnt come from Earth and not even from the Solar system and must have been created somewhere else.
Most of you probably aren't that surprised that there is such material to be found on Earth. This is prehistoric dust that Philipp Heck and his colleagues from Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago got from the Murchinson meteorite. This large and pretty famous carbonaceous chondrite that did weigh about 100 kg fell near Murchison in Australia. It has a lot of organic substances and the extremely old cosmic dust. Plus, similarly to other meteorites with a high degree of organic substances it smells – a lot.
Dust Forged In Dead Stars
The already mentioned grains of cosmic dust were forged in the explosions of dying stars that were long gone from the Universe before the Sun even started to shine. New analysis shows that some of the grains were created a few million years before the Sun got created and some got created up to three billion years before our Sunday.
The Universe is filled with such grains of dust. Yet, nobody ever discovered dust older than the Solar system in terrestrial minerals. This is likely because Earth's plate tectonics, volcanic activity, and other planetary mechanics warmed and transformed all cosmic dust that fell onto our planet to such a degree that we cannot see the original cosmic dust in it. But asteroids are unchanging at least in comparison to the dynamic and constantly changing Earth. What falls on them stays on them – often for billions of years.
The majority of known grains of cosmic dust that are older than the Solar system are barely a single micron in size. But the grains from the Murchinson meteorite were much larger – two to thirty microns. They were made mostly of silicon and carbon. The researchers studied forty grains from the meteorite. They got them by melting pieces of the stinking meteorite in acid. This makes the majority of the minerals and silicates dissolve – but the cosmic dust prevails. In the end, they dated the age of the grains using neon isotopes.
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