Researchers reached this conclusion after analyzing xenon gas trapped in quartz

Jun 11, 2014 06:31 GMT  ·  By

It might not be ready and willing to admit to this in public anytime soon but, as it turns out, our planet is significantly older than it was previously believed. What's more, researchers claim that the same is true for the moon orbiting it.

Speaking at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference in Sacramento, California, this past June 10, researchers announced that, according to evidence at hand, Earth and its moon came into being about 60 million years earlier than assumed.

This claim is based on information obtained while analyzing the properties of xenon gas trapped quartz samples recovered from South Africa and Australia, EurekAlert informs.

Specialists had to turn to quartz samples and have a look at the xenon gas inside them in order to determine the age of our planet due to the fact that geological clues from the time our planet formed are few and far in between.

The South African samples that the scientists got to analyze are estimated to be about 3.4 billion years old. The Australian ones, on the other hand, are believed to date back to about 2.7 billion years ago.

Researchers say that the xenon gas that they contain has remained unchanged throughout our planet's history. Hence, by comparing it with current isotopic ratios of xenon, they managed to get a better idea of when Earth formed.

“The composition of the gases we are looking at changes according the conditions they are found in, which of course depend on the major events in Earth's history,” explains Guillaume Avice with the University of Lorraine in Nancy, France.

“The gas sealed in these quartz samples has been handed down to us in a sort of 'time capsule'. We are using standard methods to compute the age of the Earth, but having access to these ancient samples gives us new data, and allows us to refine the measurement,” he adds.

What this means is that, contrary to previous claims, the collision between a so-called proto-Earth and a body about the size of Mars believed to have led to the formation of the moon and to have shaped our planet occurred not 100 million, but 40 million years after the formation of the solar system.

“This might seem a small difference, but it is important. These differences set time boundaries on how the planets evolved, especially through the major collisions in deep time which shaped the solar system,” researcher Bernard Marty comments on the importance of this discovery.