The Wedderburn meteorite, found just north-east of the town in 1951, was a small 210-gram chunk of strange-looking space rock that fell out of the sky. For decades, scientists have been trying to decipher its secrets, and researchers just decoded another.
In a new study led by Caltech mineralogist Chi Ma, scientists analysed the Wedderburn meteorite and verified the first natural occurrence of what they call 'edscottite': a rare form of iron-carbide mineral that's never been found in nature.
Since the Wedderburn meteorite's spacey origins were first identified, the distinctive black-and-red rock has been examined by numerous research teams - to the extent that only about one-third of the original specimen still remains intact, held within the geological collection at Museums Victoria in Australia.
The rest has been taken away in a series of slices, extracted to analyse what the meteorite is made from. Those analyses have revealed traces of gold and iron, along with rarer minerals such as kamacite, schreibersite, taenite, and troilite. Now we can add edscottite to that list.
The edscottite discovery - named in honour of meteorite expert and cosmochemist Edward Scott from the University of Hawaii - is significant because never before have we confirmed that this distinct atomic formulation of iron carbide mineral occurs naturally.....read more>>>...
