AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Meteorite diamond8/1/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() The images revealed inclusions (impurities) of sulfur, iron, and a mineral called chromite, as well as warping of the diamond crystal and nearby graphite.Īccording to the researchers, this means the diamonds formed at the extreme pressure of 20 gigapscals - about 180 times as crushing as the pressure found at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the deepest point in Earth's oceans. ![]() This means the rock that fell to Earth nearly a decade ago was part of a "lost" planet formed - and completely destroyed - at the dawn of the solar system. Scientists now think those gems and the impurities found inside them could only come from the heart of a Mercury-to-Mars-size planet. Meteorite hunters recovered about 50 fragments, which researchers later named the "Almahata Sitta" collection after a nearby train station in Sudan.īut while many stony meteorites hail from Mars, these were peculiar: They contained a bunch of tiny diamonds. The stony meteorite, called asteroid 2008 TC 3, plunged through the atmosphere, exploded, and rained its pieces over the Nubian Desert in Africa. Asteroid TC 3, as it's called, may be the first pristine chunk of a "lost" planet ever recovered on Earth.Īfter a 4.5-billion-year journey through space, a car-size rock fell to Earth on October 7, 2008.Scientists think the planet was destroyed 4.5 billion years ago and was the size of Mercury or even Mars.The diamonds and impurities found inside them suggest the rock came from inside a planet.A meteorite that fell to Earth in October 2008 contained scores of small diamonds.According to Christoph Salzmann, a chemist at University College London and co-author of a paper describing the research, “through the controlled layer growth of structures, it should be possible to design materials that are both ultra-hard and also ductile, as well as have adjustable electronic properties from a conductor to an insulator. Now, these graphene growths can be studied and possibly be made in a lab. Lonsdaleites are named after Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, a British crystallographer and University College London’s first female professor.īut, while they were studying the lonsdaleite in the meteorite, the team found that instead of the pure hexagonal structures they were expecting, the structures had “growths of another carbon-based material called graphene interlocking with the diamond.” Known as diaphites, these growths have a layered pattern inside the meteorite that “don’t line up perfectly,” according to a statement by the researchers. Rather, lonsdaleite diamonds – naturally formed only when asteroids strike Earth at enormously high speeds – have a hexagonal crystal structure and form only under extremely high pressures and temperatures. These unique diamond structures inside the Canyon Diablo meteorite, which hit Earth 50,000 years ago and was discovered in Arizona in 1891, are nothing like the diamonds we all know and picture. An international study led by UCL (University College London) and Hungarian scientists found a never-seen-before structure – an interlocking form of graphite and diamond – inside a meteorite that hit Earth 50,000 years ago.Īccording to an article on Live Science, the structure has unique properties “that could one day be used to develop superfast charging or new types of electronics”. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |