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Related: About this forumMeteorite contains the oldest material on Earth: 7-billion-year-old stardust
From phys.org:
Stars have life cycles. They're born when bits of dust and gas floating through space find each other and collapse in on each other and heat up. They burn for millions to billions of years, and then they die. When they die, they pitch the particles that formed in their winds out into space, and those bits of stardust eventually form new stars, along with new planets and moons and meteorites. And in a meteorite that fell fifty years ago in Australia, scientists have now discovered stardust that formed 5 to 7 billion years ago-the oldest solid material ever found on Earth.
"This is one of the most exciting studies I've worked on," says Philipp Heck, a curator at the Field Museum, associate professor at the University of Chicago, and lead author of a paper describing the findings in PNAS. "These are the oldest solid materials ever found, and they tell us about how stars formed in our galaxy."
The materials Heck and his colleagues examined are called presolar grains-minerals formed before the Sun was born. "They're solid samples of stars, real stardust," says Heck. These bits of stardust became trapped in meteorites where they remained unchanged for billions of years, making them time capsules of the time before the solar system..
But presolar grains are hard to come by. They're rare, found only in about five percent of meteorites that have fallen to Earth, and they're tiny-a hundred of the biggest ones would fit on the period at the end of this sentence. But the Field Museum has the largest portion of the Murchison meteorite, a treasure trove of presolar grains that fell in Australia in 1969 and that the people of Murchison, Victoria, made available to science. Presolar grains for this study were isolated from the Murchison meteorite for this study about 30 years ago at the University of Chicago.
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Meteorite contains the oldest material on Earth: 7-billion-year-old stardust (Original Post)
Jim__
Jan 2020
OP
PatrickforO
(14,577 posts)1. The face of God!
Sorry....I know this is the science group, but this is truly a marvel! And it does look like a face.
Boomer
(4,168 posts)2. The face of Quetzalcoatl, perhaps! n/t
RT Atlanta
(2,517 posts)3. Amazing!
"We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden..."
-Crosby Stills Nash & Young
Canoe52
(2,948 posts)4. way kewl!