They are estimated to come from the collision of an ancient dwarf planet in our solar system with a large asteroid about 4.5 billion years ago.
Strange rare hexagonal diamonds of extraterrestrial origin Australian scientists discovered in four meteorites found in northwest Africa. The mysterious tiny diamonds are thought to have come from the collision of an ancient dwarf planet in our solar system with a large asteroid about 4.5 billion years ago, with some fragments ending up on Earth.
Diamonds are called Lonsdaleites from the name of the famous British crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale, of Britain’s first female member of the Royal Society of Sciences. Like regular diamonds, they are made of carbon, but their atoms are arranged in a hexagonal instead of a cubic structure.
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The researchers from Monas and RMIT universities and the Australian Consortium, led by geology professor Andy Tomkinswho made the relevant publication in the Journal of the National Academy of Sciences of the US (PNAS), reported that the hexagonal structure of the “alien” diamonds makes them about 60% harder than the usual cubic-shaped diamonds created in the subsurface of our planet.
The discovery – which ended doubts about whether such material actually existed on Earth – was made using sophisticated electron microscopy techniques. It is hoped that – if it becomes possible to produce such diamonds synthetically – they can be used in the future for various industrial applications, such as for the creation of tiny highly durable mechanical parts, blades, etc.
For the first time there had been evidence of existence of hexagonal diamonds on Earth, in the 1960s, when related crystals were found in meteorites in the US and India, but they were too small – nanometer in size – so it was difficult to confirm that such hexagonal diamonds actually exist in nature. This time, thanks to now sophisticated scientific instruments, larger crystals (on the micrometer scale or 1,000 times larger than those on the nanometer scale) have been found inside meteorites that show beyond doubt that lonsdaleites are real.
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