U.S
A group of researchers said Monday that new techniques allowed him to identify the older solid material never found in the land.
The star dust, formed between five and seven billion years ago, comes from a meteorite that fell 50 years ago in Australia, they said in an article published Monday in the PNAS magazine.
His fall was recorded in 1969 in Murchison, in the state of Victory, and the scientists of Chicago Field Museum They have kept a fragment of it for five decades.
Philipp Heck, curator of meteorites in the museum, examined the presolar grains, which are pieces of star dust that are trapped in these traveling rock formations, turning them into time capsules of the period before the sun was born.
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“They are solid samples of stars, star dust” more specifically, he said Heck it’s a statement.
When the first stars died after 2,000 million years of life, they left behind star dust, which formed in the block that fell to the earth as a meteorite in Australia.
Although researchers first identified grains in 1987, their age had not been determined so far.
But heck and other colleagues recently used a new method to establish the age of these grains, which are microscopic in size. They are made of silicon carbide, the first mineral formed when a star cools.
A decade ago, just 20 grains of meteorite They were dated using a totally different method. The employee now employed by the researchers allowed them to determine the age of 40 grains, most of which are between 4,600 and 4,900 million years old.
AFP
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