Meteorite contains the oldest material on Earth: 7-billion-year-old stardust

[Timeshifter]

It helps with lockdown at least...

'Stars have life cycles. They’re born when bits of dust and gas floating through space find each other and collapse in on each other and heat up. They burn for millions to billions of years, and then they die...

When they die, they pitch the particles that formed in their winds out into space, and those bits of stardust eventually form new stars, along with new planets and moons and meteorites...

And in a meteorite that fell fifty years ago in Australia, scientists have now discovered stardust that formed 5 to 7 billion years ago — the oldest solid material ever found on Earth'

“It starts with crushing fragments of the meteorite down into a powder ,” explains Jennika Greer, a graduate student at the Field Museum and the University of Chicago and co-author of the study. “Once all the pieces are segregated, it’s a kind of paste, and it has a pungent characteristic-it smells like rotten peanut butter.”

This “rotten-peanut-butter-meteorite paste” was then dissolved with acid, until only the presolar grains remained. “It’s like burning down the haystack to find the needle,” says Heck'

Once the presolar grains were isolated, the researchers figured out from what types of stars they came and how old they were.

Im done

Meteorite contains the oldest material on Earth: 7-billion-year-old stardust | Geology Page

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Username: Banta
Date: 2020-05-03 01:01:49
Reaction Score: 7

I was wondering, how does one (pretend) to date stardust? From the article:

Once the presolar grains were isolated, the researchers figured out from what types of stars they came and how old they were. “We used exposure age data, which basically measures their exposure to cosmic rays, which are high-energy particles that fly through our galaxy and penetrate solid matter,” explains Heck. “Some of these cosmic rays interact with the matter and form new elements. And the longer they get exposed, the more those elements form.

“I compare this with putting out a bucket in a rainstorm. Assuming the rainfall is constant, the amount of water that accumulates in the bucket tells you how long it was exposed,” he adds. By measuring how many of these new cosmic-ray produced elements are present in a presolar grain, we can tell how long it was exposed to cosmic rays, which tells us how old it is

Well, rainfall isn't constant, how about cosmic rays?

. An intercalibrated record (the “pseudo‐Climax neutron monitor record”) is developed for the interval 1428–2005. It is used to study several features of the long‐term periodicities in the cosmic radiation, after discussion of residual effects due to meteorological effects, and the production of 10Be by solar cosmic rays. It is shown that (1) the average intensity in the neutron monitor energy range for the interval 1954–1996 is ∼16% less than the average for the period 1428–1944 and that it shows a consistency and depth of modulation that had not occurred in the previous 580 years.

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I suppose this is how you get a range of about two billion years for your dating estimate.

It is a good thing that everyone in "science" have such specialized knowledge, because any sort of rudimentary glance into information outside of your niche will contradict whatever narrative you're trying to sell. It seems one can only believe the "truths" of their own field provided they insulate themselves from everything else!

 

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Username: andym
Date: 2020-05-03 05:26:59
Reaction Score: 2

so i am still wondering what rotten peanut butter smells like...

 

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Username: ISeenItFirst
Date: 2020-05-03 14:03:54
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I'm wondering what characteristics are of "pre-solar" grains that make them resistant to acid treatment.

Seems fairly arbitrary to me. Age selective acid?

Maybe I should read the whole article.

 

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Username: BrokenAgate
Date: 2020-05-03 15:19:52
Reaction Score: 3

I read it, and it has a lot of words without actually saying much. Lots of assumptions about cosmic rays, with no supporting evidence. They mention that 100 of these grains could fit on the period at the end of a sentence. How do they test something that small? How do they know the grains are from before the solar system formed? How do they know that their techniques for determining age aren't flawed? Surely, something that's been floating around in outer space could pick up contaminants.