How old is the moon?
Old moon?: The moon cooled to a solid 4.4 billion years ago.Courtesy ViaMoi
Where did the moon come from?
Scientific studies indicate the solar system formed about 4.6 billion years ago and that about 4.5 billion years ago an object about the size of Mars hit the Earth, blasting away material that eventually cooled into what is now our moon. (Read more in Science News: "The Solar sytem's big bang")
How do we know the moon's age?
Rocks brought back from the moon contain zircon crystals. Zircons crystallize only after 80 to 85 percent of a volume of molten rock has solidified. By understanding how uranium within the zirconium breaks down into lead, scientists believe they know when the crystals formed with an error margin of less than 4 million years. The oldest zircons from the moon are about 10 million years older than the oldest yet discovered on Earth. The ages of lunar zircons identified in other studies hint that small amounts of the moon’s crust remained molten for another 200 million to 400 million years.
"Alexander Nemchin and his colleagues have used a uranium-lead dating technique to scrutinize a 0.5-millimeter-wide zircon embedded in a moon rock collected by Apollo 17 astronauts in December 1972. The crystal — which, although small, is rather large as zircons go — is about 4.417 billion years old, the researchers report online January 25 in Nature Geoscience."
Source:
Science News: "Oldest zircon fine-tunes history of moon's formation"
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the moon is older then the acuall earth :] because a astroid came into the earth and hear wee are now :]]
i think 99,000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 BC years old
That Isn't Actually How The Earth Really Started.
are moon rocks heavy or lite?
They are the same as the Earth's crust because that is where they came from.
If space dust is a constant?
Why can't sience detuman the age of the moon ,by how much dust is on the surface??
Nice idea but the dust is always disturbed by meteor impacts. A better technique is to use half-life properties of radioactive dirt which was done and showed the moon to have cooled about the same time as the Earth.
So by evolution and expansion, the earth gave birth to the moon.
So romantic!
When something the size of Mars smacks Earth hard enough to break off a chuck the size of the moon I would not call it evolution, expansion, or romantic!
could our water have come from this combination of earth and now moon? does the time scale match?
To learn about the origin of Earth's water click this link.
Origin of water on Earth
awhh i know what is the age of our moon for now, well it means i don't have to make my mind worst
Wouldn't something the size of the moon destroy the Earth on impact?
Yes, I think it would. The molten debris would split into two globs that would then cool to become Earth and Moon.
yes it would the debris off the astroid and the melted iron rock would split the earth into 2 globes
so then 'artifactor' it is your contention (and the rest of the establishment using your hypothesis) that the perfectly spherical shape of the moon and earth after this alleged collision is the result of 4 billion years of uni-planar rotation/spinning with no more than a 23 degree variance/wobble?
nope.
that would give us a cylindrical shape even if the impact meant that the strating morphology were at best an icosahedron.
try again.
Whoa! Those are a lot of fancy words! I'm not sure I follow—why would the Earth have been an icosahedron?
I'll let Art handle this, but here are a couple thoughts I had: the Earth actually isn't a perfect sphere, is it? As I understand it, it's sort of a slightly squashed sphere shape. Also, I was under the impression that the spherical (or mostly-spherical) shape of planetary bodies wasn't totally determined by their rotation, but by their mass—that's why big (but not super big) things like asteroids remain chunky and uneven, while objects approaching the size of a planet or moon sort of pull themselves into a ball (because of their own gravity).
What's your explanation, boss? ("Try again" is oh so sassy, but not so illuminating.)
The universe is full of spheres, not cylinders nor icosahedrons.. As JGordon says, large heavenly bodies become spheres because of gravity.
are moon rocks heavyer than earth rocks or r they the same weight?
i think moon rocks r the same weight not 100% sure
meteor shower this month 21 and 22 u will b able to c 20 meteors per hour
how big was earth before the astroid hit it
things were alot different before the astroid hit the oxygen levels were different the atmosphere was different butt i think Earth Was The same size as it is now .
The reptilians drove the moon into our orbit before colonizing this planet around 800,000 B.C.
a large astroid from the astroid belt collided with another astroid causing it to go off course and into the earths orbit. thats how the earth was destroyed
large meteor shower tonite and the 18th
what are meteorites
meteorites are pieces of nickel iron rock most meteorites come from the astroid belt
astronomy. what are carbonoxious chondrites made of?
carbonaxiouse chondrites are made of carbon and silica inclusions. ps meteor shower tonite a tomorrow.
Dont take that crap. Moon is a lot older than earth and most likely has been brought here from different solar system. It will all come out soon. Just watch.
If earth is 4 billion yrs old then life has probably been wiped out a few times then reinvented. So its a good chance that if life were to have existed uninterupted for say a billion years then it would have evolved to a level where it might have eradicated ageing and maybe even left earth to aviod extinction because of climate change or a meteorite.So maybe the green men in flying saucers are actually a form of us that left earth 2-3 billion yrs ago ?
The moon is 4.5 billion years old. You guys are wrong!
:)
5.3 billion years old, all u sheep should listen to Never A Straight Answer more often, makes me look better.
what if the earth is only 6k years old and th mon was formed at the same time as the earth
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