Earth may be much older than we thought, scientists say

These huge rocks invaded earth nearly 4 to 3.8 billion years ago and scientists believe that these large celestial bodies are the major sources of water on our planet’s oceans.

They are known as time capsules because they preserve materials from their environment as they form.

“The early Earth certainly wasn’t a hellish, dry, boiling planet; we see absolutely no evidence for that”, Harrison said. (Or it is also possible that the late heavy bombardment started millions of years earlier than was previously thought). They were examined using a technique known as Raman spectroscopy, a method that details the chemical and molecular makeup of samples, showing the data in three dimensions.

One of the 79 zircons contained graphite – pure carbon – in two locations, which also contained a characteristic signature, specific in ratio to carbon-12 and carbon-13 which indicated photosynthetic life, according to Fox News.

“Our view of the first many hundreds of million years of Earth history as a roiling, lifeless and continent-free world was actually based on zero observational evidence”, Harrison said.

The researchers, led by Elizabeth Bell – a postdoctoral scholar in Harrison’s laboratory – studied more than 10,000 zircons originally formed from molten rocks, or magmas, from Western Australia. And if so, did life grow right after?

After studying them all they found a single zircon with graphite in – which turned out to be 4.1 billions years old.

If confirmed, the discovery means that life emerged a remarkably short time after the Earth was formed from a prim-ordial disc of dust and gas surrounding the sun 4.6 billion years ago.

The study’s scientists are “very confident” about the graphite’s age. “There is no better case of a primary inclusion in a mineral ever documented, and nobody has offered a plausible alternative explanation for graphite of non-biological origin into a zircon”.

They wrote: “This study extends the terrestrial carbon isotope record around 300 million years beyond the previously oldest-measured samples from southwest Greenland”. That bombardment would have wiped out any earlier life, but it restarted very quickly.

The research suggests life in the universe could be abundant, Harrison said. And now, a team at UCLA says it has found evidence of life that is older than those rocks.

Bell concisely summed up the significance of the findings, stating simple that, in light of the discovery, “We need to think differently about the early Earth”.