We are unlikely to ever be able to accurately answer this question. For a long time, people were interested in the question: "How old is the Earth?" The answers to this question have reached us in the form of myths, legends, and traditions. From a scientific point of view, scientists began to look for an answer a little more than four hundred years ago, when the heliocentric theory of the existence of the solar system appeared and began to strengthen. To find out how old planet Earth was, it was first necessary to answer the question: “How did the solar system form, one of the elements of which is considered our planet Earth?”. She is the third planet from the Sun. Currently, the most famous are the two hypotheses of the appearance of the Sun and planets, which can tell us how old the Earth is .
The first, called the nebular hypothesis, claims that before the formation of the solar system in space there was a gigantic-sized hot gas cloud, which decreased in size, throwing out huge clots of gas. The gas cloud, decreasing in size, turned into the Sun, and huge clots of gas, concentrating, turned into planets, one of which was our Earth.
Another theory, which also tried to clarify the question of how old the Earth is, is called planetesimal. According to this theory, before the appearance of the Sun and the Earth in space, there were huge clusters of relatively small relatively solid bodies, which scientists call planetesimals, and the Sun was in the middle of this mass. When a large star flew near this cluster of bodies, parts of this mass came off under the action of the attractive forces of a massive star. These parts, in turn, began to attract small planetesimals. It is like snow sticking to a big snowball in winter. So, according to this theory, planets appeared, and our Earth is among them.
Which of these two theories is more correct, we do not know, but regardless of this, astronomers, answering the question of how old the Earth is, calculated that it was approximately five and a half billion years old. But in science it is so accepted that in order to consider the information true, confirmation from other sources is necessary. More accurate information was obtained using the method of radiometry. According to these data, the age of the Earth was set at 4.54 billion years ± 1%. As a result of the scientific and technological revolution and the development of radiometric methods, it turned out that some samples of minerals on Earth are over one billion years old. In Australia, zircon crystals were found, the age of which was determined using this method and it turned out to be approximately 4 billion 404 million years! Based on these facts, and also taking into account the mass and luminosity of the Sun and other stars, scientists came to the conclusion that the age of the Solar system and, accordingly, the Earth cannot be much greater than the age of these crystals.
In meteorites, nodules with a high content of calcium and aluminum are found. These are the oldest known samples of science formed in the solar system. Scientists define their age as 4.567 billion years. This will be the upper limit of the age of the Earth, which will help us answer the question of how old the Earth is.
Scientists suggest that approximately ten million years after the appearance of the planet Earth, it had its own satellite - the Moon, which began to revolve around the Earth and at the same time affect the tides of the seas and oceans, the speed of rotation of our planet. At the same time, the inclination of the Earth's axis became constant.
The relief of the Earth has changed significantly over billions of years of existence, including due to the fall of meteorites, the largest of which could influence the change of climate on the planet, lead to the formation of lakes, islands and seas.