New research by DTM’s Richard Carlson, former Carnegie fellow Maud Boyet, and collaborators point to a younger age for the Earth’s Moon than previously thought.  Their findings appear online today in Nature.

Ferroan anorthosite, or FAN, is believed to be the oldest of the Moon’s crustal rock types, but scientists have had difficulty dating FAN samples. The team used newly refined techniques to determine that a sample of FAN from the lunar rock collection at the NASA Johnson Space Center formed 4.36 billion years ago. This is the first study in which a single sample of FAN yielded consistent ages from multiple isotope dating techniques. Their result strongly suggests that this age pinpoints the time at which the sample crystallized and, by inference, the time of formation of the Moon’s earliest crust.

“The extraordinarily young age of this lunar sample either means that the Moon solidified significantly later than previous estimates, or that we need to change our entire understanding of the Moon’s geochemical history,” Carlson said.

For more information, see Carnegie’s press release.