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The first eon in Earth's history, the Hadean, begins with Earth's formation and is followed by the Archean eon at 3.8 Ga. [2]: 145 The oldest rocks found on Earth date to about 4.0 Ga, and the oldest detrital zircon crystals in rocks to about 4.4 Ga, [34] [35] [36] soon after the formation of Earth's crust and Earth itself.
Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago by accretion from the solar nebula, a disk-shaped mass of dust and gas left over from the formation of the Sun, which also created the rest of the Solar System. Initially, Earth was molten due to extreme volcanism and frequent collisions with other bodies.
The earliest evidence for life on Earth includes: 3.8 billion-year-old biogenic hematite in a banded iron formation of the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Canada; [30] graphite in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks in western Greenland; [31] and microbial mat fossils in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone in Western Australia.
Apparently, Pangea broke apart at about the speed fingernails grow.
c. 4,450 Ma – 100 million years after the Moon formed, the first lunar crust, formed of lunar anorthosite, differentiates from lower magmas. The earliest Earth crust probably forms similarly out of similar material. On Earth the pluvial period starts, in which the Earth's crust cools enough to let oceans form.
Mars reaches the same solar radiation flux as Earth today, after which it will suffer a similar fate to the Earth as described above. [99] 6.6 billion The Sun may experience a helium flash, resulting in its core becoming as bright as the combined luminosity of all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. [120] 7.5 billion
The Solar System formed at about 9.2 billion years (4.6 Gya), [5]: 22.2.3 with the earliest evidence of life on Earth emerging by about 10 billion years (3.8 Gya). The thinning of matter over time reduces the ability of the matter to gravitationally decelerate the expansion of the universe; in contrast, dark energy is a constant factor tending ...
The U.S. space agency's robotic OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in 2020 collected the samples from the near-Earth asteroid, a rocky remnant of a larger celestial body that had formed near the dawn of the ...