Scientists Finally Able To Pinopoint The Actual Age Of The Moon, And it's Much Older Than Ever Thought

Moon the closest neighbor of the earth is much older than it was thought to be. This is the first time in space history scientists calculated the most accurate age of Moon.

A research team from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) started analysis on the rocks and soils collected by Apollo 14 astronauts who left their footprints on Moon surface in 1971. New studies suggest that Moon is about 4.51 billion years old, just 60 million years inferior to the Solar system.

At the first time, it was believed that Moon was formed 100 to 200 million years after the birth of Solar system. Lead researcher from UCLA’s Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences Department, Melanie Barboni said in a statement to space.com,“We finally pinned down a minimum age for the moon formation, we are really sure that this age is very, very robust”.

Barboni and her team took the fragmentS of the mineral Zircon, collected from the Apollo 14 lunar soil sample. The team radiometrically dated those samples By measuring the amount of decaying Uranium into Lead.Not only Uranium, they also monitored how much daughter isotopes formed with the decaying Hafnium. Their findings were first published in the journal of ScienceAdvances.

The fragment which is not more than the size of a grain, helped scientists to pinpoint the Moon’s birthday. At the beginning of the experiment, scientists faced some sort of difficulties because the collected samples were the mixture of rocks formed during meteorite strikes. The Zircon mineral was the ultimate key to success although it was the biggest misconception among people that Zircon has no uses.

Barboni thinks that the new findings will help scientists to understand the history of Solar system and how the Earth was made. If the Giant impact theory was true then the advanced age of the Moon also make sense from a dynamics point of view. Those impactors were must be flying around the Solar system from the beginning days. Now Barboni is planning to collect zircon from the Moon’s mantle and overlying crust to calculate the age of the Moon with more accuracy.