Seven-billion-year-old stardust found in Australian meteorite predates the Sun

In 1969, a meteorite fell on a small Australian farming town and was gathered up like ordinary stones — yet within those fragments, scientists would eventually find grains of silicon carbide older than the Sun itself. By 2020, researchers had dated forty of these microscopic presolar grains to roughly seven billion years of age, making them the oldest solid material ever measured on Earth. They are not relics of our solar system but survivors of it — dust born in dying stars that drifted through interstellar space for billions of years before being sealed, by chance, into a primitive rock that