A new study claims that Jupiter is the oldest planet in the Solar System.

A team of researchers from the University of Munster in Germany and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California allege that Jupiter’s core was nearly 20 times the size of Earth just 1 million years after the birth of the Sun, 4.6 billion years ago, and it was vital to the formation of our Solar System.

According to Engadget:

“The team came to the conclusion after testing for the presence and abundances of molybdenum and tungsten isotopes in some iron meteorites that fell to Earth. They found that the meteorites contained components from two distinct reservoir of materials, thanks to the data from the molybdenum isotopes. One reservoir has material from a different star than ours that didn’t make it to the other reservoir.

The data from the tungsten isotopes, on the other hand, showed that the two pools of materials were separated for 2 to 3 million years. In addition, they’ve been separated as early as a million years into the formation of the solar system.”

The team said “the most plausible mechanism to efficiently separate two disk reservoirs for an extended period is the accretion of a giant planet in between them,” and so Jupiter was probably that giant planet.

But there’s one thing that might bother anyone reading this type of news: how does the ordinary person without any kind of scientific background independently verify this info, and confirm it to be true? How do we know this is accurate?

We must also be aware that some of the researchers involved come from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. If you trusted these people, you’d be trusting the bowels of the military industrial complex, researchers from an institution that has been involved with nuclear warfare and other morally abominable activities for decades.

According to Wikipedia, Lawrence Livermore is: “self-described as “a premier research and development institution for science and technology applied to national security.” Its principal responsibility is ensuring the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons through the application of advanced science, engineering and technology.

The Laboratory also applies its special expertise and multidisciplinary capabilities to preventing the proliferation and use of weapons of mass destruction, bolstering homeland security and solving other nationally important problems, including energy and environmental security, basic science and economic competitiveness.”

In addition, geoengineering researcher Peter A. Kirby wrote about evidence suggesting the laboratory may have been involved with weather modification, with other entities such as MITRE Corporation and Raytheon.

Seemingly innocuous, interesting bits of scientific info from this laboratory might be trustworthy, as people trust NASA with it’s shady history, but people would be well advised to use caution trusting this source.

(Image credit: NASA)