Researchers have confirmed the existence of a celestial diamond, which is harder and stronger than a regular diamond, and say it arrived on Earth's surface by way of a meteorite.
Researchers have confirmed the existence of a celestial diamond after finding it on Earth's surface. Professor Andy Tomkins, left, from Monash University with RMIT University PhD scholar Alan Salek are pictured here with a ureilite meteor sample.
What's more, the natural chemical process through which scientists believe lonsdaleite formed could inspire a way to manufacture super-durable industrial components, according to the authors of theThe revelation started to unfold when geologist Andy Tomkins, a professor at Monash University in Australia, was out in the field categorizing meteorites.
With its cutting-edge methods and possibilities for the future, the discovery is exciting, said Paul Asimow, a professor of geology and geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology. Asimow was not involved in the study. Diamonds and lonsdaleite can form in three ways. It can be through high pressure and temperature over a long period of time, which is how diamonds form on the Earth's surface; the shock of a hypervelocity collision of a meteor; or the release of vapors from broken-up graphite that would attach to a small diamond fragment and build upon it, Asimow said.
"It seems like a strange claim that we have a name for a thing, and we all agree what it is," he added, "and yet there are claims in the community that it's not a real mineral, it's not a real crystal, that you could have a macroscopic scale." Regular diamonds, such as the ones you see in fine jewelry, are made out of carbon and have a cubic atomic structure, Salek said. As the hardest material known up until now, they are also used in manufacturing.Researchers have come up with models for the structure of lonsdaleite before, and they theorized the hexagonal structure could make it up to 58 per cent harder than regular diamonds, Salek said.
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