Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Jan 1998
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1998lpico.957...34p&link_type=abstract
Origin of the Earth and Moon, Proceedings of the Conference held 1-3 December, 1998 in Monterey, California. LPI Contribution N
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Astrophysics, Geochronology, Interstellar Matter, Radioactive Isotopes, Solar System, Planetary Evolution, Earth (Planet), Isotope Ratios, Lunar Evolution, Moon, Aluminum Isotopes, Protoplanets, Planetary Geology, Solar System Evolution
Scientific paper
The issue of the Earth's antiquity is a traditional problem that well predates the modern scientific era. With the advent of the era of isotopic geochronology the problem of the age of the Earth has become relatively narrowly, but only relatively, circumscribed, and frustrating uncertainties remain. In the modern paradigm, formation of the Earth is one of the processes involved in formation of the solar system. The age of the Earth therefore cannot be greater than the age of the solar system as a whole. The value of this upper limit age, about 4.57 Ga, is actually fairly well established. This follows most simply from consideration of CAIs (Ca-AI-rich inclusions), refractory objects found within undifferentiated meteorites that are widely held to have formed within the solar system and that have the greatest absolute ages of any known solar system products. CAIs are also reliably inferred to have contained some rather short-lived radionuclides, notably Al-26 (half-life 0.71 m.y.), and so must have formed no more than a few (more likely on the order of 1) million years after synthesis of these radionuclides. There is disagreement about the astrophysical environment in which this nucleosynthesis took place, but in all viable models it occurred prior to the formation of the solar system by collapse of an interstellar cloud or during the Sun's protostellar evolution, so that formation of CAIs must have been essentially contemporaneous with formation of the solar system, within no more than a few million years.
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