Scientists Say These Mysterious Diamonds Came From Outer Space

Strange Mysterious Diamonds from an ancient dwarf planet in our solar system may have formed shortly after the dwarf planet collided with a large asteroid about 4.5 billion years ago.

A team of scientists says they have confirmed the existence of lonsdaleite, a rare hexagonal form of diamond, in ureilite meteorites from the mantle of a dwarf planet. The research team – with scientists from Monash University, RMIT University, CSIRO, the Australian Synchrotron, and Plymouth University – found evidence of how lonsdaleite formed in ureilite meteorites. They published their findings on September 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Geologist Professor Andy Tomkins from Monash University led the study. RMIT Professor Dougal McCulloch, one of the senior researchers involved, said the team predicted the hexagonal structure of lonsdaleite’s atoms made it potentially harder than regular Mysterious Diamonds, which had a cubic structure. “This study proves categorically that lonsdaleite exists in nature,” said McCulloch, Director of the RMIT Microscopy and Microanalysis Facility.

“We have also discovered the largest lonsdaleite crystals known to date that are up to a micron in size – much, much thinner than a human hair.” According to the research team, the unusual structure of lonsdaleite could help inform new manufacturing techniques for ultra-hard materials in mining applications.McCulloch and his RMIT team, PhD scholar Alan Salek and Dr. Matthew Field, used advanced electron microscopy techniques to capture solid and intact slices from the meteorites to create snapshots of how lonsdaleite and regular Mysterious Diamonds formed. There’s strong evidence that there’s a newly discovered formation process for the lonsdaleite and regular diamond, which is like a supercritical chemical vapor deposition process that has taken place in these space rocks, probably in the dwarf planet shortly after a catastrophic collision,” McCulloch said. “Chemical vapor deposition is one of the ways that people make diamonds in the lab, essentially by growing them in a specialized chamber.” Tomkins said the group proposed that lonsdaleite in the meteorites formed from a supercritical fluid at high temperature and moderate pressures, almost perfectly preserving the shape and textures of the pre-existing graphite.

Source: This news is originally published by pensandpatron