Moreover, in 2009, scientists found an unknown mineral in Siberia that arrived on Earth 4.5 billion years ago, that is, when the solar system was just being formed.
This rare but strange piece of material was found in a box received from the Italian Museum of Natural History in Florence.
According to an international team of researchers led by scientists from Princeton University, he arrived on Earth with the Khatyrka meteorite, which fell near the Koryak Mountains in Eastern Siberia. When scientists analyzed the mineral, they were not intrigued by its age, but by its atomic structure.
The structure of this mineral has never been found in nature before, although it was artificially created in the laboratory. They are known as “quasicrystals” because they look like crystal on the outside but are noticeably different on the inside.
The researchers studied a small fragment of the mineral. The atoms of matter were arranged in a wide variety of configurations that, based on human understanding of science and chemical composition, were simply not possible in nature.
Quasicrystals have their own dramatic history. Dan Shechtman grew the first quasicrystal in 1982, a discovery so controversial that he was simply asked to leave the research lab. But the evidence was overwhelming: it was a new type of material. Shechtman was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery.
The concept of quasicrystals was first introduced in 1984 by Steinhardt and Dov Levin, then working at the University of Pennsylvania. When the team discovered that the meteorite contained this mysterious, ancient and intricately engineered material, they declared that it could indeed form naturally.
“This discovery provides important evidence
that quasicrystals can form in nature under astrophysical conditions and
suggests that this phase of matter can remain stable for billions of
years,” said physicist Paul Steinhardt, Albert Einstein Professor of
Natural Sciences at Princeton....<<<Read More>>>...
