Diamonds found in four meteorites in north-west Africa probably came from an ancient dwarf planet, and they are expected to be harder than Earth diamonds
Mysterious hexagonal diamonds that don’t occur naturally on Earth have been discovered in four meteorites in north-west Africa.
“It’s really exciting because there were some people in the field who doubted whether this material even existed,” saysHexagonal diamonds, like regular diamonds, are made of carbon, but their atoms are arranged in a hexagonal structure rather than a cubic one.Also known as lonsdaleite, hexagonal diamonds were first reported in meteorites in the US and India in the 1960s.
To hunt for larger crystals, Salek and his colleagues used a powerful electron microscope to peer into 18 meteorite samples. One was from Australia and the rest were from north-west Africa. They found hexagonal diamonds in four of the African meteorites, with some crystals measuring up to a micrometre in size – about 1000 times bigger than previous discoveries. This allowed the team to confirm the unusual hexagonal structure.
“It’s an important discovery because now we have larger crystals, we can get a better idea of how they formed and maybe replicate that process in the lab,” says Salek.
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