The oldest rock on Earth

The oldest rock on earth has been discovered in the lunar rock samples brought by the astronauts of the Apollo missions.

In a large rock baptized as pit versa, a small fragment composed of quartz, feldspar and zirconium was found embedded, all of them minerals very common in the earth, but it would be very strange if the fragment came from here.

To know it, they submitted it to a chemical analysis that concluded that it had formed in a very oxidizing environment and under temperatures similar to those of the earth, the Zirconium present in the rock has been essential to calculate its age, since these minerals contain uranium, which allows to date them with great precision, in this way it was possible to conclude that the fragment has between four thousand and four thousand one hundred million years so it could be a little more long-lived than the oldest rocks found in the earth.

It is believed that it reached the moon due to a powerful meteorite impact that hit the young earth this or that the moon was a very different world from what it is today in the soul of the solar system, a finding that will not only give us clues what the earth was like at the beginning but also the formation of our satellite.