A team from Nagoya University in Japan and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) have used a new method to gauge the age of gas giant Jupiter, suggesting it could be used to pin down the timings of when the planets of the Solar System formed. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Figuring out the age of the planets is, as you might imagine, a tricky business. It was only in 1953 that we finally pinned down an approximate age of the Earth, when geochemist Clair Cameron Patterson measured lead isotopes in meteorite samples, tightly constraining the age of our Solar System. Further analysis of the oldest zircons on Earth has helped to support this dating, putting the age of our planet at around 4.543 billion y

See Full Page