Solar System Actually 2 Million Years Older Than It Totally Swore It Was

Well then! The solar system turns out to be no better than my Mom, for it has been lying about it’s fuggin’ age for some time now. It’s okay solar system, I still think you’re gorgeous, and resplendent, et cetera. In fact, you have a nice, mature glow to you. Nothin’ to be ashamed about.

New Scientist:

Without celebrating a birthday, the solar system just got hundreds of thousands of years older.

To deduce when its first solid grains formed, researchers analyse structures up to a centimetre across found in meteorites. Such “inclusions” were created when gases cooled to form the sun and planets and are among the oldest solids in the solar system.

Now Audrey Bouvier at Arizona State University in Tempe, and colleagues, have analysed inclusions in a meteorite that fell to Earth in north-west Africa in 2004.

Based on the extent to which uranium-238 and uranium-235 isotopes had decayed into their daughter isotopes lead-207 and lead-206, they say the solar system is 4.5682 billion years old. That’s between 0.3 and 1.9 million years older than previous estimates, which relied on the Efremovka and Allende meteorites found in Kazakhstan in 1962 and Mexico in 1969, respectively.

Seriously, you can barely see the entropy, solar system. I won’t tell no one the truth, anyways.