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MeteorWayne
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http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/s ... 00822.html
The solar system may be up to two million years older than previously thought, a new study has found.
Researchers studying bits of a meteorite discovered that the space rock was 4.5682 billion years old, predating previous estimates of the solar system's age by up to 1.9 million years. This adjustment, though ever so slight, should help astronomers better understand how the sun and planets formed.
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Age of the solar system
And even such small adjustments to the solar system's age can be very important to astronomers seeking to understand how the sun and planets formed.
As an example, Bouvier and Wadhwa cite the abundance of the isotope iron-60 in the proto-solar system. Iron-60 is radioactive, with a half-life of about 2.6 million years. Every 2.6 million years, half of the iron-60 in a given sample decays away.
So if you push the age of the solar system back by about two million years, that means there was almost twice as much iron-60 present during its birth than previously thought. And this increased concentration has consequences: it strongly supports the idea that a supernova exploded nearby during the solar system's formation, injecting huge quantities of heat that helped nascent bodies differentiate....
The solar system may be up to two million years older than previously thought, a new study has found.
Researchers studying bits of a meteorite discovered that the space rock was 4.5682 billion years old, predating previous estimates of the solar system's age by up to 1.9 million years. This adjustment, though ever so slight, should help astronomers better understand how the sun and planets formed.
........
Age of the solar system
And even such small adjustments to the solar system's age can be very important to astronomers seeking to understand how the sun and planets formed.
As an example, Bouvier and Wadhwa cite the abundance of the isotope iron-60 in the proto-solar system. Iron-60 is radioactive, with a half-life of about 2.6 million years. Every 2.6 million years, half of the iron-60 in a given sample decays away.
So if you push the age of the solar system back by about two million years, that means there was almost twice as much iron-60 present during its birth than previously thought. And this increased concentration has consequences: it strongly supports the idea that a supernova exploded nearby during the solar system's formation, injecting huge quantities of heat that helped nascent bodies differentiate....