An ASU press release announces that the "Arizona State University researchers Audrey Bouvier and Meenakshi Wadhwa [Center for Meteorite Studies] analyzed meteorite Northwest Africa (NWA) 2364 and found that the age of the Solar System predates previous estimates by up to 1.9 million years." [right, Audrey Bouvier in the age dating lab at ASU. Credit, Audrey Bouvier]
"The study’s findings, published online on August 22 in Nature Geoscience, fix the age of the Solar System at 4.5682 billion years old..."
While this sounds like a minor adjustment, Dr. Wadhwa says it means that there was "as much as twice the amount of iron-60, a certain short-lived isotope of iron, in the early Solar System than previously determined," which can only be explained as coming from a supernova, that he suggests was a cause of the Solar System formation.
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