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Earth formed in this manner about 4.54 billion years ago (with an uncertainty of 1%) [25] [26] [4] and was largely completed within 10–20 million years. [27] In June 2023, scientists reported evidence that the planet Earth may have formed in just three million years, much faster than the 10−100 million years thought earlier.
It is commonly used as a unit of time to denote length of time before the present in 10 9 years. This initialism is often used in the sciences of astronomy, geology, and paleontology. The "billion" in bya is the 10 9 "billion" of the short scale of the U.S., [1] not the long-scale 10 12 "billion" of some European usage.
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.
In physical cosmology, the age of the universe is the time elapsed since the Big Bang: 13.8 billion years. [1] Astronomers have two different approaches to determine the age of the universe . One is based on a particle physics model of the early universe called Lambda-CDM , matched to measurements of the distant, and thus old features, like the ...
The universe has appeared much the same as it does now, for many billions of years. It will continue to look similar for many more billions of years into the future. The galactic disk of the Milky Way is estimated to have been formed 8.8 ± 1.7 billion years ago but only the age of the Sun, 4.567 billion years, is known precisely. [69]
The geologic time scale is a way of representing deep time based on events that have occurred throughout Earth's history, a time span of about 4.54 ± 0.05 Ga (4.54 billion years). [3] It chronologically organises strata, and subsequently time, by observing fundamental changes in stratigraphy that correspond to major geological or ...
In 1862, the physicist William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin published calculations that fixed the age of Earth at between 20 million and 400 million years. [21] [22] He assumed that Earth had formed as a completely molten object, and determined the amount of time it would take for the near-surface temperature gradient to decrease to its present value.
Common name Started (millions of years ago) Life: 4,200 Archaea: 3,700 ... 20–15 Subfamily: ... For another billion years, prokaryotes would continue to diversify ...