“I don’t think the 4.25-billion-year age is 100 per cent certain, but it’s the most credible number we have so far – more reliable than model-based crater counting or meteorites with unknown origins,” said planetary scientist Yang Wei of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics in Beijing.
“It’s based on the only direct evidence we’ve ever collected and measured from the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin,” said Yang, who was not directly involved in the study but coordinates a nationwide research effort that gave select teams early access to samples from the Chinese lunar mission Chang’e‑6.
The findings, which he described as the most important among a collection of five papers submitted to the journal Nature for peer review last September, were rejected twice by a review panel dominated by Western scientists.
