Age of solar system from radiometric dating sex dating in tripoli iowa

But inside the zircon, the team was able to pull out four different elements: uranium, lead, lutetium, and hafnium.Since uranium - a radioactive element - eventually turns into lead after long periods of time, the researchers could analyse how long the lead had been forming, giving them an accurate date of the Moon’s birth.Darwin had argued that the Earth was immensely old — which gave his gradual process of evolution plenty of time to unfold.The great physicist Lord Kelvin had countered that the planet was actually relatively young — perhaps 20 million years old.The team performed a process known as uranium-lead dating on zircon samples that were extracted from the Apollo 14 space rocks.

Geological timekeeping continues to be a lively science, with new methods emerging all the time.At the dawn of the twentieth century, physicists made a revolutionary discovery: elements are not eternal.Atoms can fuse together to create new elements; they can also spontaneously break down, firing off subatomic particles and switching from one element to another in the process (see figure, right).Thanks to rocks collected during the Apollo 14 mission, researchers say they’ve finally pinpointed the exact age of the Moon, and it turns out, our lunar neighbour is an incredible 4.51 billion years old.These findings suggest that the Moon was formed roughly 60 million years after the Solar System first formed, making it up to 140 million years older than previous estimates."Establishing the age of the Moon is critical to understanding Solar System evolution and the formation of rocky planets, including Earth.