In 1969, people in the small  town of Murchison, Australia watched a rock from space burn  across the sky and shatter over the surrounding fields.

And as soon as scientists picked up the pieces and started … sciencing … they quickly realized, this  wasn’t just any meteorite. It was very old, and it contained a kind  of crystal rarely seen on this planet.

Since then, the Murchison meteorite has become one of the  most-studied rocks of all time. Because there’s a case to be made  that it’s the oldest rock on Earth. Older than Earth itself!  Older than the solar system!

And it may hold answers to some  of astronomy’s oldest questions. [intro jingle] Murchison is a special kind of  meteorite called a chondrite. These rocks formed when our solar system =was just a big, swirling cloud of  gas left over from old, dead stars. And what makes them special is the fact that they’ve essentially  been frozen in time ever since.

Unlike rocks on Earth,  chondrites come from objects that were too small to stir up geological  activity or form an atmosphere. They were never transformed by heat,  pressure, or chemical reactions. So, over four-and-a-half-billion years later, they’re nearly pristine time capsules  from the beginning of the solar system.

In fact, some of the little white specks  you can see in the Murchison meteorite are the very first solids our  solar system ever created. They’re minerals containing  calcium, aluminum, and titanium that condensed straight out  of the gas cloud as it cooled. So if you think this burned-up  rock doesn’t look like much … fair.

But remember: It captured the moment when a  swirling cloud of dead-star dust started giving birth to our planets. After doing a little sleuthing, scientists figured out that  Murchison also captured a moment in our Sun’s history that points to some  wild times in our star’s early days. These clues came out of some blue, microscopic crystals trapped  within the grains of the meteorite.

They belong to another mineral called hibonite that formed early on in the  hot disk around the Sun. When scientists melted some  of these crystals to see what gases were trapped inside, they found something intriguing: special  kinds of the elements neon and helium. Scientists believe they formed during  blasts of radiation from the Sun, as high-energy particles  knocked nuclei out of elements like aluminum and oxygen, forcing them to rearrange into new elements.

So, the presence of these  gases hints that our infant Sun was not the steadily burning star we know today. It used to have violent outbursts, where it sent waves of high-energy  particles washing over the solar system. If there had been living  things on Earth at the time, they would have been hammered  by lethal bursts of radiation.

Fortunately, there was no life around yet. But the ingredients for life  were already coming together. And Murchison sheds light on that too.

Despite being a barren rock, fragments of this meteorite  are full of organic compounds. And you can smell them! Even after all these years, if  you’re studying a piece of Murchison, you can still catch a whiff  of something like wet hay, Brussels sprouts, or methylated  alcohol, depending on who you ask.

These organic compounds include  dozens of different amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. And fragments of Murchison also  have a bunch of important molecules called nucleobases that make up DNA and RNA So, the same basic stuff that  makes up the genetic code of every living thing on Earth  is just hanging out on asteroids. So far, we don’t know if there’s any connection between rocks like Murchison and life on Earth.

But it’s possible th t these rocks delivered at least some of the key ingredients for life when Earth was a brand-new planet. And this rock contains a whole other layer of old. While most of it formed 4.5 billion years ago, there are tiny crystals in it, called pre-solar grains, that are even older.

These come not from our primordial  solar system, but a past solar system. But before I tell you more about that, a quick ad. Thanks for watching this SciShow video!

And thanks for watching all  the other Complexly shows too! Complexly makes a lot of  stuff, from Eons to Study Hall. And we have a new show coming to Complexly! … maybe.

It’s called Endlings and it’s all  about the last member of a species. And it’s about people and our  own relationship to extinction. But Endlings only might be coming to Complexly because we’re crowdfunding it /right now/.

If you back the project, you’ll  be the reason it’s possible. To thank you for your help, you’ll get some very cool merch featuring Endlings and extinct creatures like passenger pigeons. To contribute, check out  complexly.com/endlings right now.

Time is running out! Or is it? Sort of it is!

So thanks for supporting Endlings today. Scientists used to think that  the formation of our solar system was so violent that it  vaporized any surviving solids, wiping away every trace of what came before it. But Murchison, along with a few other meteorites, has proved them wrong.

While analyzing the different isotopes,  or different types of elements, that were present in Murchison, scientists discovered some that were different from what we see in our solar system. For example, unusual types  of nitrogen and aluminum seemed to have formed in places  much hotter than the Sun. Scientists have figured out  that these were forged in older, hotter stars that existed before the Sun did.

Exactly how much older is hard to say, though. These elements are miniscule, and they’re trapped in a  matrix of organic molecules, so they’re hard to pluck out and study in a lab. But scientists have attempted  to pin down their ages.

Over time, as elements in these grains are  exposed to cosmic rays from other stars, some of them, like neon,  decay into different forms. By measuring how many are in their decayed form, scientists can estimate how old the grains are. As best as anyone can tell, half of  them are around 300 million years older than the solar system.

One study even proposed that a single  presolar grain in the Murchison meteorite was close to 7 billion years old. Although again, these  numbers are really uncertain. Either way, they show us  that, as violent as things got during the birth of our solar system, the record of that time has  not been completely erased.

So this charred rock that crash-landed into Earth turns out to be an incredible  tool for exploring our origins. Even if it’s a little smelly, it’s given us one of the  clearest glimpses into the events that formed our little  neighborhood of the universe. Thanks for dropping by, Murchison! [ OUTRO ]