The Murchison meteorite, which fell in Australia in 1969, is far more than a simple space rock. It’s a 4.5-billion-year-old time capsule containing clues to our solar system’s violent birth and the chemical origins of life. More remarkably, it holds microscopic “presolar grains” of stardust from long-dead stars, with some estimated to be a staggering 7 billion years old.
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