By Desiree Salas (staff@latinospost.com) | First Posted: Feb 25, 2014 10:08 PM EST

Can you guess how old our planet is?

Earth, according to scientists, is approximately 4.5 billion years old. However, the oldest fossils discovered so far are only about 3.5 billion years old, CNN noted. While this shouldn't mean that the third rock from the sun is as old as that fossil, there have been no direct evidence that it is so. Until now.

Scientists announced Sunday, via the journal Nature Geoscience, that they have dated a "tiny zircon crystal" to be about 4.4 billion years old, Reuters reported.

"The researchers said the discovery indicates that Earth's crust formed relatively soon after the planet formed and that the little gem was a remnant of it," the news agency said.

The "gem of a gem" was found on a sheep ranch in Western Australia in 2001. Its age was determined using 2 different techniques which adds to the validity of the measurement.

"This is the oldest and the best dated of all the crystals that have been reported," declared the study's lead author, John Valley. He is also a professor in the Department of Geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the CNN qualified.

Valley also described the 400 micrometer-long crystal as translucent red, turning blue when bombarded with electrons. It's so tiny that it's just a bit bigger than a house dustmite.

"To determine the age of the zircon fragment, the scientists first used a widely accepted dating technique based on determining the radioactive decay of uranium to lead in a mineral sample," Reuters said. "But because some scientists hypothesized that this technique might give a false date due to possible movement of lead atoms within the crystal over time, the researchers turned to a second sophisticated method to verify the finding."

"They used a technique known as atom-probe tomography that was able to identify individual atoms of lead in the crystal and determine their mass, and confirmed that the zircon was indeed 4.4 billion years old."

Samuel Bowring, a professor of geology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that the "incredibly laborious" technique can also be applied to samples from other planets - which may be possibly extracted within the next ten years if NASA's 2020 rover mission proceeds as planned.

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