A grain of stardust extracted from the Murchison meteorite that landed in Victoria in 1969 was dated to roughly 7 billion years old, meaning it condensed in the atmosphere of a dying star more than 2 billion years before the Sun existed

A grain of stardust extracted from the Murchison meteorite that landed in Victoria in 1969 was dated to roughly 7 billion years old, meaning it condensed in the atmosphere of a dying star more than 2 billion years before the Sun existed

A silicon carbide grain the width of a bacterium, extracted from a rock that fell on a dairy farm outside Melbourne in 1969, condensed in the outflow of a dying star roughly seven billion years ago — more than two billion years before the Sun ignited. No older solid material has ever been identified on Earth. The grain came out of the Murchison meteorite, and the age was published in January 2020 by a team led by cosmochemist Philipp Heck at the…