The sun, at 4.6
Natalie Starkey, a researcher from Open University in Milton Keynes, has found evidence to suggest that Earth's water is older than even the sun and dates back far earlier than what was previously theorized.
Earth has water older than the Sun | Nature.
Scientists now think the Earth's story began around 4.6 billion years ago in a disk-shaped cloud of dust and gas rotating around the early sun, made up of material left behind after the sun's formation.
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.
Our Earth isn't even the oldest planet in our Solar System, that would be Jupiter. The Earth is estimated to be 4.54 billion years old, so the Universe itself is, on average, around three times older than our Earth but only if the Universe is indeed 13.8 billion years old.
Current estimates put the age of Earth at around 4.54 billion years, give or take about 50 million years, and like all other bodies in the solar system, Earth formed when a cloud of dust and gas collapsed due to gravity. This means our sun, planets, asteroids and moons are also around the same … age.
The water on our Earth today is the same water that's been here for nearly 5 billion years. So far, we haven't managed to create any new water, and just a tiny fraction of our water has managed to escape out into space. The only thing that changes is the form that water takes as it travels through the water cycle.
It took 13.8 billion years of cosmic history for the first human beings to arise, and we did so relatively recently: just 300,000 years ago. 99.998% of the time that passed since the Big Bang had no human beings at all; our entire species has only existed for the most recent 0.002% of the Universe.
In 2000, scientists looked to date what they thought was the oldest star in the universe. They made observations via the European Space Agency's (ESA) (opens in new tab) Hipparcos satellite and estimated that HD140283 — or Methuselah as it's commonly known — was a staggering 16 billion years old.
Scientists looked to the moon's mineral composition to estimate that the moon is around 4.425 billion years old, or 85 million years younger than what previous studies had proven. That's around the time Earth's core settled, the researchers said. CNN's Ashley Strickland contributed to this report.
Earth is the only planet in our solar system not named after a Greco-Roman deity. The name used in Western academia during the Renaissance was Tellus Mater or Terra Mater, the Latin for “earth mother”, i.e. “Mother Earth”, goddess of the earth in ancient Roman religion and mythology.
The Sun formed about 4.6 billion years ago in a giant, spinning cloud of gas and dust called the solar nebula. As the nebula collapsed under its own gravity, it spun faster and flattened into a disk.
Adam is the name given in Genesis 1-5 to the first human. Beyond its use as the name of the first man, adam is also used in the Bible as a pronoun, individually as "a human" and in a collective sense as "mankind".
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.
In Earth's Beginning
At its beginning, Earth was unrecognizable from its modern form. At first, it was extremely hot, to the point that the planet likely consisted almost entirely of molten magma. Over the course of a few hundred million years, the planet began to cool and oceans of liquid water formed.
A team of researchers studying the origin of the water in our solar system has concluded that up to half of it formed before the sun itself was born—that is, in the cloud of dust and gas that was the progenitor of our solar system. If water can form in abundance in such clouds, then it may be found everywhere.
Pangea, also spelled Pangaea, in early geologic time, a supercontinent that incorporated almost all the landmasses on Earth. Pangea was surrounded by a global ocean called Panthalassa, and it was fully assembled by the Early Permian Epoch (some 299 million to about 273 million years ago).
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.
Currently, the most favored explanation for where the Earth got its water is that it acquired it from water-rich objects (planetesimals) that made up a few percent of its building blocks. These water-rich planetesimals would have been either comets or asteroids.
Or not so much? Our Sun is 4,500,000,000 years old. That's a lot of zeroes. That's four and a half billion.
Earth may have been a water world 3 billion years ago. Calculations show that Earth's oceans may have been 1 to 2 times bigger than previously thought and the planet may have been completely covered in water.
But in about 5 billion years, the sun will run out of hydrogen. Our star is currently in the most stable phase of its life cycle and has been since the formation of our solar system, about 4.5 billion years ago.
From about 1.2 million years ago to less than 100,000 years ago, archaic humans, including archaic Homo sapiens, were dark-skinned.
No! After the dinosaurs died out, nearly 65 million years passed before people appeared on Earth. However, small mammals (including shrew-sized primates) were alive at the time of the dinosaurs.