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According to an badysis by the Earth and Planetary Science Letters, the rock is supposed to be the oldest known and formed at the same time as our planet was formed.
Until this discovery, the oldest known rocks were about 2 billion years old. This rock formed 4 to 4.1 billion years ago, nearly 20 kilometers below the earth's crust, but the most curious is that it was found far from the surface of our planet, on the Moon.
The rock was between the samples brought by the crew of Apollo 14, and since then the scientists have badyzed them methodically. This rock was at the bottom of the list, but it seemed to be the most interesting.
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NASA's Moon Science and Exploration Center (CLSE) identified this small sample as being of terrestrial origin, as it contains several minerals such as quartz and feldspar, common on the Earth but rare on the Moon, allowed to determine the depth of the rock under the surface of the Earth by molecular badysis.
It is possible that it was formed in the Moon, but it is very far away. The rock, unlike the other rock samples of the Moon, is composed of an extremely high amount of Earth's minerals and an extremely small amount of minerals that we usually find on the satellite natural of our planet. In addition, it should have been formed in the moon's core and appear one way or the other on the surface.
Of course, the question of how this rock could have appeared on the Moon is intriguing: for starters, the Moon itself was once part of the Earth, separated by a collision with a particularly large asteroid at the beginning of the Moon. history of our planet. It is possible that in the early years of our solar system, when there were big asteroids everywhere, one of them hit the Earth and threw debris into space, and the One of these rocks landed on the surface of our satellite.
Before the discovery, there were only hypotheses about what would be the first rocks on Earth, but scientists now have to work on something. And there is a good chance it will not be the only part of our Earth on the surface of the Moon.
David Kring, lead investigator of CLSE and one of the major authors of the recently published article, said the next step was to look for mineral signatures.
"It's an extraordinary discovery that helps to paint a better picture of the primitive Earth and the bombing that has turned our planet into the dawn of life," Kring said. (function (d, s, id) {
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