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, as the old beliefs go, he's a pretty venerable one. Earth's lunar companion is thought to have formed not long after the planet itself, some 4.4 billion years or so ago, when the Solar System was young., which was still warm and squishy and newly formed, and broke off a huge cloud of debris that coalesced into
That means that the Moon is at least 4.46 billion years old, says a team led by geologist Jennika Greer, now at the University of Glasgow – just a hair younger than Earth, which is an estimatedof the Field Museum and University of Chicago."And because we know how old these crystals are, they serve as an anchor for the lunar chronology.".
These microscopic crystals can be found in samples of Moon dirt retrieved during the Apollo era from the lunar sample. Greer and her colleagues studied zircon found in samples from Apollo 17, the last lunar mission, which took place in 1972. These crystals, the team says, must have formed after the Moon's surface solidified, from the"When the surface was molten like that, zircon crystals couldn't form and survive.
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