A little over four and a half billion years ago, dust circling our young sun was collecting into balls that would become planets. Heat from radioactive decay melted these balls of dust into blobs of molten rock, growing as they accumulated more material. A small piece of one of these molten objects broke away and traveled around the solar system for eons before falling to Earth as a meteorite in the Algerian desert. Now, very accurate dating of this meteorite is giving new insight into the formation of the Solar System. The work, by an international team including Professor Qingzhu Yin and colleagues at the UC Davis Department of Earth and Planetary Science and collaborators at Australian National University, was published Aug. 29 in Nature Communications.