Scientists use meteorites to calculate the approximate age of the Solar System.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA – Scientists have put the estimate of the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years. The figure is determined by studying the ages of objects in the universe and how fast they can expand.
Scientists know when the universe came into existence, not everything in it arose spontaneously. The formation of more than 100 million galaxies takes additional time, as does the number of solar system countless in these galaxies. Likewise, it takes time to build the Solar System that we inhabit.
Creation of the solar system
When did the solar system form? Astronomers and physicists who have studied the solar system are much younger. Scientists determine the Solar System formed when enormous concentrations of dust and gas gathered to produce stars. It is believed that Sun are the result of the same process.
The gases begin to agglomerate rapidly and grow denser. Eventually, this gas cloud became so dense that this growing body part collapsed on its own. When the pressure inside reaches a certain amount, fusion occurs and hydrogen is converted into helium. This causes strong winds that expel waste material from the body.
From here, young stars are created. The remaining material from this star is allowed to compress into a disk that revolves around the newly formed sun.
Everything in the solar system was created from this disc. The planets, moons, and asteroids are all rooted in discs of remnant stellar material that will eventually clump together and separate themselves while maintaining orbits around the sun from which they originated.
The Solar Center at Stanford says because the sun appeared at the same time the disk once revolved around it, humans could determine solar system age only by studying the core material that was once inside the disk. What materials did they study to measure how old our part of the universe is? meteorite.
The sun is 4.6 billion years old
Quoted Slashgear, Monday (7/3/2022), meteorites were analyzed to determine the radioactive decay of two elements, namely potassium and uranium. Using the knowledge that all materials will decay radioactively into one isotope, it is simply a matter of determining the half-life of the material in meteorite the.
Universe Today discusses how these materials can have half-lives of 700 million to 100 billion years. They used radiometric dating to determine when the rock under analysis was last melted or disturbed enough to rehomogenize the radioactive elements.
Using this technique, the meteorite studied was 4.6 billion years old. Rocks on Earth studied in the same way turn out to be only 4.3 billion years old. Since these meteorites formed from a disk that was created at the same time as the sun, they would be the same age and put the solar system’s age at about 4.6 billion years and counting.
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