Microscopic grains of dead stars are the oldest known material on the planet — older than the moon, Earth and the solar system itself. By examining chemical clues in a meteorite's mineral dust, researchers have determined the most ancient grains are 7 billion yearsIt is sometimes abbreviated Gy, Ga ("giga-annum"), Byr and variants. The abbreviations Gya or bya are for "billion years ago", i.e. billion years before present. The terms are used in geology, paleontology, geophysics, astronomy, and physical cosmology.https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Billion_years
At 4.4 billion years old, geologists have discovered the oldest piece of Earth—a zircon crystal.
Roughly two million years old, this tool, known as the Kanjera stone, was part of a new Stone Age technology that helped make better-fed, smarter hominins.
The world's oldest known water has been discovered by researchers in Canada. A 17-year search of Ontario's Kidd Creek Mine uncovered liquid that has been trapped between rocks for 1.6 billion years, according to the team at the University of Toronto.
Jericho, Palestine
A small city with a population of 20,000 people, Jericho, which is located in Palestine, is believed to be the oldest city in the world.
The study pushes back the clock on the origin of Earth's water by hundreds of millions of years, to around 4.6 billion years ago, when all the worlds of the inner solar system were still forming.
Earth is estimated to be 4.54 billion years old, plus or minus about 50 million years. Scientists have scoured the Earth searching for the oldest rocks to radiometrically date.
Astronomers have discovered what may be the oldest and most distant galaxy ever observed. The galaxy, called HD1, dates from a bit more than 300 million years after the Big Bang that marked the origin of the universe some 13.8 billion years ago, researchers said on Thursday.
The first long-lived matter particles of any kind were protons and neutrons, which together make up the atomic nucleus. These came into existence around one ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang.
In a new study, Stanford physicists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin have calculated the number of all possible universes, coming up with an answer of 10^10^16.
The earliest life forms we know of were microscopic organisms (microbes) that left signals of their presence in rocks about 3.7 billion years old.
At the current rate of solar brightening—just over 1% every 100 million years—Earth would suffer this "runaway greenhouse" in 600 million to 700 million years. Earth will suffer some preliminary effects leading up to that, too.
Formation. When the solar system settled into its current layout about 4.5 billion years ago, Earth formed when gravity pulled swirling gas and dust in to become the third planet from the Sun. Like its fellow terrestrial planets, Earth has a central core, a rocky mantle, and a solid crust.
Officially, the current epoch is called the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago after the last major ice age.
Water flows endlessly between the ocean, atmosphere, and land. Earth's water is finite, meaning that the amount of water in, on, and above our planet does not increase or decrease.
Water on Earth predates the solar system, and even the sun. Some of the water molecules in your drinking glass were created more than 4.5 billion years ago, according to new research. That makes them older than the Earth, older than the solar system — even older than the sun itself.
Floodplain dinosaurs slurped from local rivers, while forest dinosaurs drank water rich in minerals that had circulated through the rocks, picking up volcanic salts on the way.
All of the planets, except for Earth, were named after Greek and Roman gods and godesses. The name Earth is an English/German name which simply means the ground. It comes from the Old English words 'eor(th)e' and 'ertha'. In German it is 'erde'.
October 23 is (in)famous as supposed earth's birthday – this date is mentioned in many textbooks retelling the life of Irish Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656).
By 2050 , the world's population will exceed at least 9 billion and by 2050 the population of India will exceed that of China. By 2050, about 75% of the world population will be living in cities. Then there will be buildings touching the sky and cities will be settled from the ground up.
Eventually, the entire contents of the universe will be crushed together into an impossibly tiny space – a singularity, like a reverse Big Bang. Different scientists give different estimates of when this contraction phase might begin. It could be billions of years away yet.
Over thousands of years, the amount of sunshine reaching Earth changes by quite a lot, particularly in the northern latitudes, the area near and around the North Pole. When less sunlight reaches the northern latitudes, temperatures drop and more water freezes into ice, starting an ice age.
Our universe began with an explosion of space itself - the Big Bang. Starting from extremely high density and temperature, space expanded, the universe cooled, and the simplest elements formed. Gravity gradually drew matter together to form the first stars and the first galaxies.
Many scientists believe that RNA, or something similar to RNA, was the first molecule on Earth to self-replicate and begin the process of evolution that led to more advanced forms of life, including human beings.