» Fri Feb 18, 2011 11:53 pm If memory serves, there is a process known as radiocarbon dating. There is a possibility that is what was used. While they cannot get an exact age, they can get a pretty good estimation of it's age trough this process.
Radiocarbon dating would be absolutely useless for something 4.5 billion years old (its useful limit is around 60,000 years). However, other types of radiometric dating such as uranium-lead dating or potassium-argon dating would be suited for a sample of this age. However, it should be noted that these methods couldn't be accurately used directly on the meteorite, but rather would need to be used on terrestrial material right around the meteorite (with the assumption that the age of the material around the meteorite corresponds to when the meteor fell to earth).
Is there anything we can actually do with Wassonite? Or does it simply give us new information about conditions 4.5 billion years ago and what could have formed?
It would probably be of interest to cosmologists and astronomers as they'd be curious what kind of conditions caused it to form. It might also be of interest to folks working in materials science, as there could end up being useful properties to this previously unknown crystal structure, and modifications (such as trying to keep the same crystal structure while swapping out selenium for sulfur) could also potentially produce useful results. In short, it's a starting point for new research, and if the scientists already knew where it would take them then it wouldn't be research.
