My oldest artifact!

Small Israelite Hacksilber hoard in context.

Samaria. Circa 7th century BCE

three of the Hacksilber pieces are:

2 Gerah - 1.12 g

3 Gerah - 1.71 g

10 Gerah/Beqa - 5.70 g

 

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This is a picture of 1g Rheingold, gold of the river Rhine. It comes from the supernova explosion (or an equal event) from which our solar system emerged. As far as we know today, it took place ca. 5 Bill. years ago. I do not believe that there are older objects.


Jochen

 

Oh, I can beat that. The electrons binding everything around me condensed out within a microsecond of the Big Bang itself.

 

Dang! You beat me to the punch...

 

I was thinking Carbonaceous chondrites in meteorites is similarly old enough...

 

I thought that carbonaceus chondrites have been formed in the Solar system and gold is presolar.

Jochen

 

I guess it comes down to what you mean by "formed".

The Origin of Elements



Nearly all of the matter we can see and touch "predates the solar system" if you're talking about the individual atoms. When we talk about old objects, I think most people are thinking about "a lump of stuff that's been the same general shape since X".

From that point of view, a billion-year-old rock is really old because it's been a rock for a billion years. Its atoms are older than that. So are the atoms in the fingers I'm using to type this.

The atoms in that gold formed before the solar system, but they didn't form lumps of metal until they condensed, and then got concentrated through geological activity -- chemical changes to their surroundings, physical pressure, erosion, and so on. So from that point of view, they aren't pre-solar.

As far as we know, we don't have any lumps of stuff that came as lumps from outside the Solar System, although there's a slight chance that may be about to change. All the lumps we've examined so far were thoroughly chewed during the process of Solar System formation, and almost all a lot more recently than that.