(NewsNation) — A new analysis of a 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite indicates better methods can be used to determine the age of space rocks found on Earth.
Published online last week in the journal Nature Communications, the study also suggests the meteorite could be used to explain more about the early days of the solar system.
This new research focuses on the Erg Chech 002 meteorite, discovered in Algeria’s Sahara Desert in 2020. Erg Chech 002 is considered an achondrite rock, which Space.com says are meteorites that show signs of melting and have features similar to volcanic rock.
Researchers, in their study, analyzed lead and uranium isotopes in Erg Chech 002 to calculate its age, Australian National University’s Evgenii Krestianinov, lead scientist on the study, explained in an article published by The Conversation.
“This is one of the most precise ages ever calculated for an object from space — and our results also cast doubt on some common assumptions about the early solar system,” Krestianinov wrote.
In Erg Chech 002’s case, it contained a radioactive isotope, aluminum-26, when it was formed, the paper says. Aluminum-26 is a major heat source for early planetary melting, which Space.com says is a process in the later stage of Earth’s evolution where it formed different compositions at different layers.
“We found that the parent body of Erg Chech 002 must have formed from material containing three or four times as much aluminium-26 as the source of the angrites’ parent body,” Krestianinov said. “This shows aluminum-26 was indeed distributed quite unevenly throughout the cloud of dust and gas which formed the solar system.”
The Daily Mail writes that this is important because it challenges the idea that aluminium-26 was distributed evenly throughout the early solar system.
The half-life of aluminum is about 717,000 years, Space.com writes, which means it is too “short-lived” to be directly found in large quantities in Erc Chech 002. However, when aluminum-26 decays, it leaves behind magnesium-26, a non-radioactive isotope. This indicates that magnesium-26 can be used to find the “starting amount” of aluminum-26 in a meteorite such as Erg Chech 002, and that could then be used as a “dating system” — or “chronometer” — for space rocks.
Study authors say when using these isotopes as a chronometer, it’s “critical” to establish whether aluminum-26 was evenly distributed throughout the solar nebula that created the planets, asteroids and comets of that solar system.