Oldest Material on Earth Discovered

Researchers have discovered the oldest material ever found on Earth: tiny dust grains (stardust) trapped inside the fragments of a meteorite that crashed into Murchison in Victoria State (southeastern Australia) in a fireball in 1969.

• The stardust predates the formation of our solar system by billions of years and thus the grains have been termed ‘presolar grains’. They measure between 2 to 30 micrometers in size.
• The oldest of the retrieved grains dates back to about 7 billion years, roughly 2.5 billion years before our solar system formed.
• Stardust forms in the material ejected from stars and gets blown away by ....