A mysterious Siberian meteorite hides a crystal that cannot occur naturally on Earth

20. 01. 2021
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The crystal, or rather what appears to be a crystal, still excites the discovery of an incredibly rare meteorite in Siberia. Despite all the scientific knowledge that humanity has accumulated over the centuries, and our ever-increasing understanding of the universe, scientists are still finding things that are sometimes a huge surprise.

Khatyrka

A few years ago, scientists found a small piece of mineral that formed shortly after our solar system, about four and a half billion years ago. The mineral was brought to Earth by the Khatyrka meteorite, which landed in eastern Siberia. The mineral itself was not so interesting in its age as in its structure. We have never found its atomic structure anywhere in nature, although it has already been created under laboratory conditions. It has been termed a quasi-crystal because it looks like a crystal on the outside, but it's something completely different on the inside.

What makes a crystal a crystal is the fact that its atoms are arranged in very consistent and predictable structures that are like grids, and these structures are constantly repeated. However, the quasicrystal had an inconsistent and diverse lattice structure. Atoms have been arranged in different configurations, which, based on our understanding of science, should not be possible in natural matter.

Material studies

Many scientists doubted that such quasi-crystals could be found in nature, despite being successfully created in laboratories since the early 60s. Paul Steinhardt, a theoretical physicist at Princeton University, is not one of them. He and his team conducted an extensive study of this mineral and tried to find out how such a thing could arise on Earth, but in the end they were forced to conclude that the stone had to be brought here from somewhere outside our planet.

Meteorite from Devil's Canyon (Canyon Diablo). Photo: James St. John CC up to 2.0

According to the International Business Times, quoted by Boris Shustov, head of the Astronomical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, it is not so unusual to find new minerals inside meteorites because they are formed under different conditions than minerals formed on Earth.

Test result

Steinhardt's team agrees. The results of their research clearly showed that the formation of this unnatural quasicrystal could only occur under astrophysical conditions. The team found that this new mineral was stored in another known mineral called stishovite. Stishovite comes from meteorites and surrounded by quasicrystals, both minerals had to be formed at about the same time, under high pressure in the meteorite before it hit our planet. Another important guideline that the quasicrystal does not come from here is the fact that the ratio of oxygen isotopes found in the mineral does not correspond to any similar ratio found on Earth.

Steinhardt was quoted as saying, "The finding is important evidence that quasicrystals can form in nature under astrophysical conditions, and provides evidence that this phase of matter can remain stable for billions of years."

Icosahedral quasicrystal Ho-Mg-Zn in the form of a pentagonal dodecahedron, dual dodecahedron. Unlike the similar pyritohedron shape of some crystals of the cubic system, such as pyrite, the quasicrystal is in the shape of truly regular pentagons.

Fresh samples

His team went to Siberia to try to find more samples to study and managed to get some fresh samples from the meteorite. Even with new samples, the search for a quasicrystal is very difficult because they are really small. The team eventually found two more such quasicrystals. The latter was discovered five years after the start of their initial analysis of the samples obtained. All three quasicrystals they found had their own unique molecular structure.

Pieces of the Khatyrka meteorite are also being studied for other purposes by other teams of scientists. Chi Ma, director of analytics at the Geological and Planetary Sciences Division at Caltech (California Institute of Technology), also had a team that studied samples from the find and looked for new minerals from space. Ma and his team received recognition for discovering about 7% of all new minerals that were part of meteorites around the world. They are also responsible for finding 35 previously unknown new minerals from the same meteorite.

One of the things that makes this particular lump of cosmic rock such a rich source of new finds is that it contains a large amount of naturally occurring aluminum that has not oxidized. This is the first meteorite ever found to be so. All three quasicrystals found by Steinhardt and his team are a mixture of aluminum, iron and copper.

If we can learn from these discoveries, especially from this meteorite crystal, that the universe is much more diverse than we think, and that what we understand as the laws of science can only be applied to our small planet. .

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