This hardness could make the rare space diamond a valuable resource for industrial applications if scientists can find a way to use the new method of production to create minerals that are big enough. Researchers have come up with models for the structure of lonsdaleite before, and they theorized the hexagonal structure could make it up to 58% harder than regular diamonds, Salek said. Lonsdaleite is also made of carbon, but it has an unusual hexagonal structure instead, he added. As the hardest material known up until now, they are also used in manufacturing. Regular diamonds, such as the ones you see in fine jewelry, are made out of carbon and have a cubic atomic structure, Salek said. The weather on this exoplanet includes metal clouds and rain made of precious gemsįinding a bigger sample has shown that lonsdaleite is not just an anomaly from other diamonds, Asimow said. The night side is always oriented towards cold space, which is why it is 1500 degrees Celsius cooler there. As a result, one of WASP-121 b's hemispheres always faces the star, heating it to temperatures of up to 3000 degrees Celsius. Due to its proximity to the central star, the planet's rotation is tidally locked to its orbit around it. “We think that lonsdaleite could be used to make tiny, ultra-hard machine parts if we can develop an industrial process that promotes replacement of pre-shaped graphite parts by lonsdaleite.”Īrtist's impression of the exoplanet WASP-121 b. “Nature has thus provided us with a process to try and replicate in industry,” Tomkins said in a news release. Researchers proposed in this study that the third method formed the larger sample that they had found. The method that creates the mineral can influence its size, he added. 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. The team was able to analyze the meteorite with the help of electron microscopy and advanced synchrotron techniques, which built maps of the space object’s components, including lonsdaleite, diamond and graphite, according to the study.ĭiamonds and lonsdaleite can form in three ways. “It really takes advantage of a number of recent developments in microscopy to do what they did as well as they did it,” Asimow said. 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. “The dwarf planet was then catastrophically struck by an asteroid, releasing pressure and leading to the formation of these really strange diamonds,” he added. Tomkins theorized the meteorite that held the lonsdaleite came from the mantle of a dwarf planet that existed about 4.5 billion years, Salek said. He came across a strange “bended” kind of diamond in a space rock in Northwest Africa, said study coauthor Alan Salek, a doctoral student and researcher at RMIT University in Australia. The revelation started to unfold when geologist Andy Tomkins, a professor at Monash University in Australia, was out in the field categorizing meteorites. Slow-moving fireball over Scottish skies keeps experts guessing
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