Oldest solid material on Earth discovered

Scientists have discovered the oldest solid material ever found on the Earth, in the form of stardust trapped inside a meteorite that crashed into Australia 50 years ago.

Related Information

• This stardust provides evidence for a ‘baby boom’ of new stars that formed 7 billion years ago.
• These are the oldest solid materials ever found, and they tell us about how stars formed in our galaxy.
• The materials the researchers examined are called presolar grains-minerals formed before the Sun was born.
• These bits of stardust became trapped in meteorites where they remained unchanged for billions of years, making them capsules of the cosmic time before the solar system.
• However, presolar grains are very tiny and rare, found only in about five per cent of meteorites that have fallen to the Earth.

About Presolar grains

• They are interstellar solid matter in the form of tiny solid grains that originated at a time before the Sun was formed.
• Presolar stardust grains formed within outflowing and cooling gases from earlier presolar stars.

PAPER-III