and launched a ball of molten rock into space. As the magma surface of this object cooled and solidified, silicon crystals called zircons were formed. Because of their resilience to heat and harsh environments, the crystals still survive and can be used to identify the moon’s earliest moments.
Zircon crystals contain radioactive uranium, which decays into lead at a well-defined rate, so scientists can determine a rock sample’s age by measuring the amount of lead and uranium in it.“We now have a date of the zircons, so we can tell the time by which the magma ocean must have been solidified, or largely solidified,” says Heck. “It essentially anchors the entire lunar chronology.
Atom probe tomography, however, can analyse the make-up and position of the atoms in high detail, which helped show that they really were from radioactive decay. It uses a beam of charged particles to shave off an extremely thin section from a sample, of just a few atoms, and then a powerful laser evaporates these atoms into a mass spectrometer.We know that the solar system formed about 4.
“Previous studies have shown that the particular impact that formed the moon happened 50 million years after the formation of the solar system, so if we use that study, and this work, it is giving us a very narrow time window of only 50 million years within which the moon formed and solidified very, very quickly,” says Anand.
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