Alien mineral found in meteorite that crashed-down in Siberia
RUSSIAN gold prospectors thought they had struck it rich. On the ground before them was a yellow-specked 3.96kg lump of metal. It ended up being far more valuable.
It was a meteorite. It had only recently tumbled out of the sky.
Most of it was pretty ordinary for a meteorite: an alloy called kamacite made up of molten iron and nickel. The remaining two per cent was a sprinkling of minerals also mostly only found in space rocks.
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When put under the microscope, one of them was seen to be something new.
It hadn’t been recorded before.
Russian scientists were excited: and media reports soon declared the alien mineral to be 'harder than diamond’. This is because the substance’s structure matched that of some of the hardest known minerals in the world.
But lead researcher Victor Sharygin quickly quashed that idea. It’s hard — but not that hard.
“The hardness of uakitite was not measured directly,” he said, because the samples were too small. Instead, its properties had been estimated.
The unusual grains measure just 5 micrometers. A grain of sand it 25 times bigger.
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“Unfortunately, we failed to obtain all physical and optical properties of uakitite because of the very small sizes of the grains,” the researchers told the Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society in the Russian capital of Moscow.
New technology will need to be developed to study the tiny sample’s properties — or a larger cache found.
What they do know is the alien mineral was likely formed under immense heat. The meteorite around it shows signs of having been exposed to temperatures of greater than 1000C.
It has been dubbed uakitite because the meteorite was found in the Uakit region of Siberia.