How old is the oldest lunar rock

An image of the Earth rock found by the Apollo 14 crew. David A. Avery Thompson twitter. This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below.

While the Hadean Earth is a reasonable source for the sample, a first find of this kind may be a challenge for the geologic community to digest. He notes that samples of Hadean Earth certainly peppered the lunar surface; other samples will likely be found with additional study. Katharine Robinson, a postdoctoral researcher at the LPI, was also involved in the study, as were Dr. Marion Grange Curtin University , Dr. Marc Norman Australian National University.

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Then, early in Earth's history, a Mars-size object careened into our planet. The invader got smashed to bits and took out a big chunk of our planet with it. This collision formed a huge debris cloud around Earth that over eons coalesced into our moon. The newly theorized lunar age of 4. Such studies have happened many times before, but as instruments improve with advancing technology , it's possible for experts to make more-sensitive measurements of the rocks.

The scientists behind the new research zeroed in on the magma ocean that covered the moon shortly after the natural satellite formed; over time, this ocean cooled into the darker basalt regions still visible on the moon today. The researchers measured characteristics of three rare elements within this material: hafnium, uranium and tungsten. Most of its components, called clasts, are dark in color.

But one piece stands out as oddly bright, with a makeup similar to the granites you might find on Earth. To find out where did this outlier bit of came from, Bellucci's team re-sampled the rock and focused on minerals within it called zircons. When the team analyzed these zircons and the surrounding quartz, they found that the oddball clast formed in conditions that would've been really weird on the moon at the time.

For one, the zircons formed in far colder, oxygen-rich magmas than the moon typically has. In addition, the clast seems to have formed at pressures you'd only find on the moon more than a hundred miles below its surface.

But the impact that geologists think formed probably dug no more than 45 miles into the lunar ground. If the clast formed so deep, how did it get up to the surface? The researchers soon realized that the clast's head-scratching properties make perfect sense if it instead formed on Earth. About 12 miles beneath Earth's surface, magmas experience temperature, pressure, and oxygen levels just like the ones that formed the mystery clast.

When Bellucci made a chart that compared Earth's zircons against the lunar ones, the similarities became clear. Future research on the samples could firm up Bellucci's interpretation. It's also possible that other moon rocks currently in humanity's collection contain flecks of ancient Earth.

Fresh samples from the moon also would help—and may be coming soon. For instance, China's upcoming Chang'e-5 lunar mission is expected to return samples. But for now, work on the Apollo material is grounded. Though U. All rights reserved.