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Anyone have extra birthday candles on hand? Because NASA's about 40 million short.— a hunk of hardened magma and zircon crystal collected by the US astronauts Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan during NASA's final 1972 Apollo 17 mission — suggests that the Moon formed roughly 40 million years earlier than scientists previously thought,, the rock is roughly 4.
The impact was a "cataclysmic event for Earth and changed Earth's rotational speed," cosmochemist Philipp Heck, senior director of research at the Field Museum in Chicago and senior author of the study,. "After that, the moon had an effect on stabilizing Earth's rotational axis and slowing down Earth's rotational speed."
"The formation date of the moon is important," he added, "as only after that Earth became a habitable planet."Though the rock in question being mainly comprised of hardened magna is certainly important from a timeline perspective — it's believed that in its earliest stages, the Moon was covered with an ocean of the liquid rock — the zircon crystals embedded within it were really the stars of the study.explains, zircon takes in radioactive uranium as it forms.
Exciting as the discovery is, however, the scientists were careful to note that we still don't have all the answers.
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