To answer this question precisely, we are unlikely tosomeday we can. For a long time the person was interested in the question: "How old is the Earth?". The answers to this question have come down to us in the form of myths, legends, legends. From a scientific standpoint, scientists began to search for an answer just over four hundred years ago, when the heliocentric theory of the existence of the solar system appeared and began to strengthen. To find out how old the planet Earth was, it was first necessary to answer the question: "How did the solar system form, one of the elements of which is our planet Earth?" It is the third planet from the sun. At present, the most famous are the two hypotheses of the appearance of the Sun and the planets, which can tell us how many years the Earth.
The first, called the nebular hypothesis,argues that before the formation of the solar system in space there was a giant-sized hot gas cloud that decreased in size, throwing out huge clots of gas. The gas cloud, diminishing in size, turned into the Sun, and huge clots of gas, concentrating, turned into planets, one of which became our Earth.
Another theory that also tried to clarifyThe question of how many years the Earth is called planetesimal. According to this theory, before the appearance of the Sun and Earth in space, there were huge clusters of relatively small in size relatively solid bodies, which scientists call planetesimals, and the Sun was in the middle of this mass. When a large star flew near this cluster of bodies, parts of this mass came off under the action of the attractive forces of a massive star. These parts, in turn, began to attract small planetesimals to themselves. This is similar to the way snow sticks to a large snowball in winter. So according to this theory, planets appeared, and our Earth is among them.
Which of the two theories is more correct, weis unknown, but regardless of this, astronomers, answering the question of how many years of the Earth, have calculated that it is about five and a half billion years old. But in science it is accepted that, in order to consider the information to be true, confirmation from other sources is necessary. More accurate information was obtained using the radiometry method. According to these data, the age of the Earth was established as 4.54 billion years ± 1%. As a result of the scientific and technological revolution and the development of radiometric methods, it was found out that some mineral samples on Earth have an age of more than one billion years. In Australia, found zircon crystals, the age of which was determined with the help of this method and it was equal to about 4 billion billion 404 million years! Proceeding from these facts, and also taking into account the mass and luminosity of the Sun and other stars, scientists came to the conclusion that the age of the solar system and, accordingly, of the Earth can not be much greater than the age of these crystals.
In meteorites there are concretions with a largethe content of calcium and aluminum. This is the most ancient of the known to science samples, formed in the solar system. Their age is defined by scientists as 4.567 billion years. This will be the upper limit of the age of the Earth, which will help us answer the question of how old the Earth is.
Scientists suggest that in about tenmillions of years after the appearance of the planet Earth, it has its own satellite - the Moon, which began to move around the Earth and at the same time to influence the ebb and flow of the seas and oceans, the speed of rotation of our planet. At the same time, the Earth's axis tilt became constant.
The Earth's relief for billions of years of existencesignificantly changed, including due to the fall of meteorites, the largest of which could affect the climate change on the planet, lead to the formation of lakes, islands and seas.
