Lunar dust collected by Apollo 17 astronauts in the 1970s has revealed that the moon is 40 million years older than previously believed.
After landing on the moon on December 11, 1972, NASA astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt collected rocks and dust from the lunar surface. A new analysis of that sample detected zircon crystals and dated them to 4.46 billion years old. Previous estimates put the moon, formed by a massive celestial collision, at 4.425 billion years old."These crystals are the oldest known solids that formed after the giant impact.
"When the surface was molten like that, zircon crystals couldn't form and survive. So any crystals on the Moon's surface must have formed after this lunar magma ocean cooled," said Heck, who is also the senior director of the museum's Negaunee Integrative Research Center and a professor in the department of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago.
This research marks the first use of the analytical method of dating the crystals with atom probe tomography and was carried out using instruments at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, according to the study authors. "Radiometric dating works a little bit like an hourglass," Heck said. "In an hourglass, sand flows from one glass bulb to another, with the passage of time indicated by the accumulation of sand in the lower bulb. Radiometric dating works similarly by counting the number of parent atoms and the number of daughter atoms they have transformed to. The passage of time can then be calculated because the transformation rate is known.
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