Older but Sunny

Solar System Older Than Once Thought : Discovery News: "The solar system may be almost 2 million years older than previously thought, a new study shows.

Data from a newly studied meteorite recovered from the Saharan Desert show that the solar system formed 4,568.2 million years ago, 0.3 million to 1.9 million years earlier than other estimates. The results were published online August 22 in Nature Geoscience.

'All the interesting things we want to understand about the chemistry of our solar system happened within the first five to 10 million years,' says study coauthor Meenakshi Wadhwa, a cosmochemist from Arizona State University in Tempe. 'When you push it back by 2 million years, that's a substantial proportion of that 5 to 10 million years.'"