Scientists age solar system by 2m years | The Australian

Scientists age solar system by 2m years | The Australian: "The researchers from Arizona State University analysed the lead isotopes Pb-206 and Pb-207, which were the decayed remains of what would originally have been uranium, to work out that the minerals formed 4568.2 million years ago. Their findings, published today in Nature Geoscience, puts the birth of the solar system -- defined as the formation of the first solid grains in the cloud of gas that formed the sun and planets -- between 300,000 and 1.9 million years earlier than previously thought."

"Malcolm Walter, director of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at the University of NSW, said the 'remarkable thing' about the finding was the precision with which events as remote as the solar system's formation could now be dated.

'What this study shows, fairly convincingly it seems to me, is that the solar system is a lot older than we had previously thought,' Professor Walter said. 'We are really talking about extraordinary levels of precision -- a few hundred thousand years this way or that, which is remarkable when you are talking about an event that occurred 4.5 billion years ago.'"

"The estimated age of the universe is 13.75 +/- 0.17 billion years, the time since the Big Bang. The uncertainty range has been obtained by the agreement of a number of scientific research projects. These projects included background radiation measurements and more ways to measure the expansion of the universe. Background radiation measurements give the cooling time of the universe since the Big Bang. Expansion of the universe measurements give accurate data to calculate the age of the universe."