Scientists recently identified the oldest material on Earth: stardust that's 7 billion years old, tucked away in a massive, rocky meteorite that struck our planet half a century ago. Some of these ancient grains are billions of years older than our sun.
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00:00Earth's oldest material was just discovered, 7 billion year old stardust.
00:07This stardust was tucked away inside a meteorite that fell to Australia in 1969
00:12and was only recently found in the new analysis of the meteorite's ancient dust grains.
00:17These grains, which range from about 4 million years older than our sun to up to 3 billion years older,
00:22were likely pumped out into the universe by dying stars and then picked up by an asteroid.
00:27The universe is full of stardust that predates the sun,
00:30but this is the first time such ancient grains have been found on our planet.
00:34That's because even if such ancient grains collected on our planet while it formed,
00:38they were likely heated and transformed by planetary processes such as plate tectonics and volcanism.
00:43But these grains survived on an asteroid that hadn't really changed in billions of years.
00:47That's your Strange New Snapshot. I'm Yasmin Sapokoglu with Live Science.
00:51Not strange enough for you? Check out more strange news at LiveScience.com.
00:58You can find the most strange news at LiveScience.com.