Quote:
Originally Posted by alocky
What are you disputing, exactly Peter? The paper describes a grain of silicon carbide with an estimated age of 7 billion years. Nothing extraordinary here, we’ve always believed that the solar system was second generation at least.
The error bars on the estimate are admittedly quite large, but the technique has been validated at shorter timescales. The paper makes no claims other than the estimate of the age of a dust grain in the meteorite, so I’m curious as to why you’ve invoked Sagan on them?
Cheers
Andrew.
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They also claim there was a massive peak in star formation some 7 billion years ago:
"In order to explain our age distribution, where we have many more younger grains that we would otherwise expect, we have to explain this by this dust forming from more stars than normal," he said.
"We came to the conclusion that about 7 billion years ago there must have been an episode of enhanced star formation, probably about 50 per cent more stars formed than normal."
vs the 11 billion year UKIRT figure. Their data is thin and assumptions hardly proven. I remain sceptical as a result.