Chemical analysis of meteorites is helping scientists outline even earlier stages of our solar system’s timeline, including the moment it all began.

First, 4.57 billion years ago, a nearby star went supernova, spewing matter and a shock wave into space. The matter included radioactive elements that immediately began decaying, starting the clocks that isotope chemists now measure with great precision. As the shock wave swept through our cosmic neighborhood, it corralled the local cloud of gas and dust like a broom; the increase in density caused the cloud to gravitationally collapse, forming a brand-new star — our sun — surrounded by a placenta of hot debris.

Over the next tens of millions of years, the rubble field surrounding the sun clumped into bigger and bigger space rocks, then accreted into planet parts called “planetesimals,” which merged into protoplanets, which became Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars — the four rocky planets of the inner solar system today. Farther out, in colder climes, gas and ice accreted into the giant planets.

As the infant Earth navigated the crowded inner solar system, it would have experienced frequent, white-hot collisions, which were long assumed to have melted the entire planet into a global “magma ocean.” During these melts, gravity differentiated Earth’s liquefied contents into layers — core, mantle and crust. It’s thought that each of the global melts would have destroyed existing rocks, blending their contents and removing any signs of geochemical differences left over from Earth’s initial building blocks.

The last of the Earth-melting “giant impacts” appears to have been the one that formed the moon; while subtracting the moon’s mass, the impactor was also the last major addition to Earth’s mass. Perhaps, then, this point on the timeline — at least 60 million years after the birth of the solar system and, counting backward from the present, at most 4.51 billion years ago — was when the geochemical record of the planet’s past was allowed to begin. “It’s at least a compelling idea to think that this giant impact that disrupted a lot of the Earth is the starting time for geochronology,” said Rick Carlson, a geochemist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. In those first 60 million years, “the Earth may have been here, but we don’t have any record of it because it was just erased.”

Another discovery from the moon rocks came in 1974. Tera, along with his colleague Dimitri Papanastassiou and their boss, Gerry Wasserburg, a towering figure in isotope cosmochemistry who died in June, combined many isotope analyses of rocks from different Apollo missions on a single plot, revealing a straight line called an “isochron” that corresponds to time. “When we plotted our data along with everybody else’s, there was a distinct trend that shows you that around 3.9 billion years ago, something massive imprinted on all the rocks on the moon,” Tera said.

Wasserburg dubbed the event the “lunar cataclysm.” Now more often called the “late heavy bombardment,” it was a torrent of asteroids and comets that seems to have battered the moon 3.9 billion years ago, a full 600 million years after its formation, melting and chemically resetting the rocks on its surface. The late heavy bombardment surely would have rained down even more heavily on Earth, considering the planet’s greater size and gravitational pull. Having discovered such a momentous event in solar system history, Wasserburg left his younger, more reserved colleagues behind and “celebrated in Pasadena in some bar,” Tera said.

As of 1974, no rocks had been found on Earth from the time of the late heavy bombardment. In fact, Earth’s oldest rocks appeared to top out at 3.8 billion years. “That number jumps out at you,” said Bill Bottke, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. It suggests, Bottke said, that the late heavy bombardment might have melted whatever planetary crust existed 3.9 billion years ago, once again destroying the existing geologic record, after which the new crust took 100 million years to harden.

In 2005, a group of researchers working in Nice, France, conceived of a mechanism to explain the late heavy bombardment — and several other mysteries about the solar system, including the curious configurations of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and the sparseness of the asteroid and Kuiper belts. Their “Nice model” posits that the gas and ice giants suddenly destabilized in their orbits sometime after formation, causing them to migrate. Simulations by Bottke and others indicate that the planets’ migrations would have sent asteroids and comets scattering, initiating something very much like the late heavy bombardment. Comets that were slung inward from the Kuiper belt during this shake-up might even have delivered water to Earth’s surface, explaining the presence of its oceans.

With this convergence of ideas, the late heavy bombardment became widely accepted as a major step on the timeline of the early solar system. But it was bad news for earth scientists, suggesting that Earth’s geochemical record began not at the beginning, 4.57 billion years ago, or even at the moon’s beginning, 4.51 billion years ago, but 3.8 billion years ago, and that most or all clues about earlier times were forever lost.

Extending the Rock Record

More recently, the late heavy bombardment theory and many other long-standing assumptions about the early history of Earth and the solar system have come into question, and Earth’s dark age has started to come into the light. According to Carlson, “the evidence for this 3.9 [billion-years-ago] event is getting less clear with time.” For instance, when meteorites are analyzed for signs of shock, “they show a lot of impact events at 4.2, 4.4 billion,” he said. “This 3.9 billion event doesn’t show up really strong in the meteorite record.” He and other skeptics of the late heavy bombardment argue that the Apollo samples might have been biased. All the missions landed on the near side of the moon, many in close proximity to the Imbrium basin (the moon’s biggest shadow, as seen from Earth), which formed from a collision 3.9 billion years ago. Perhaps all the Apollo rocks were affected by that one event, which might have dispersed the melt from the impact over a broad swath of the lunar surface. This would suggest a cataclysm that never occurred.