Scientists Find New Crystals in Meteorite Dust, What Does It Look Like? page all

KOMPAS.com – Scientists have discovered the type of kristal never before recorded, hidden in tiny grains of perfectly preserved meteorite dust.

The dust was left by a huge space rock that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russianine years ago.

On February 15, 2013, a asteroid measuring 18 meters and weighing 11,000 metric tons entered the Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of about 66,950 kilometers per hour.

Fortunately, the meteor exploded about 23.3 kilometers above the city of Chelyabinsk in Southern Russia, showering the surrounding area with small meteorites and avoiding a colossal single collision with the Earth’s surface.

Also read: Mesosphere, Layer that Protects Earth from Falling Meteors

When the event occurred, experts described it as a major warning of the danger an asteroid could pose to the planet, as the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion was the largest of its kind in Earth’s atmosphere since the Tunguska event of 1908.

According to NASAthe explosion had a force 30 times greater than the atomic bomb that rocked Hiroshima.

Video footage shows the space rock burning in a flash of light brighter than the sun, before creating a powerful sonic boom that shattered glass, damaged buildings and injured about 1,200 people in the city below.

In a new study, researchers analyzed some of the tiny fragments of space rock left behind after a meteor exploded, known as meteorite dust.

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Usually meteors produce a small amount of dust when they burn, but these tiny droplets disappear because they are too small to be found, scattered by wind, dropped into water, or contaminated by the environment.

However, after the Chelyabinsk meteor exploded, a large dust plume hung in the atmosphere for more than four days before finally raining down on Earth’s surface.

Luckily, the snow cover that fell just before and after the event trapped and preserved some of the dust samples so they could be recovered soon after.

As for the type new crystal revealed when the researchers examined specks of dust under a standard microscope. One of these tiny structures, which is only large enough to be seen under a microscope, happened to be focused right in the center of one of the slides when one of the team members peered through the eyepiece.

Also read: Scientists claim to find remains of asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs 66 million years ago

It should be underlined, if the focus is on other areas, the team is likely to miss it.

After analyzing the dust with a more powerful electron microscope, scientists found more of these crystals and examined them in greater detail.

“However, finding crystals using electron microscopy is somewhat challenging due to their small size,” the researchers wrote in their paper published May 7 in The European Physical Journal Plus. Space.com, Wednesday (6/7/2022).

New crystal shapes

Kristal comes in two different forms, namely quasi-spherical (almost round) and hexagonal rods.

“Both are unique morphological peculiarities,” said the researcher.

Also read: How did the cockroaches survive the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs?

Further analysis using X-rays revealed the crystals are made of layers of graphite, a form of carbon made of overlapping sheets of atoms, surrounding a central nanocluster at the heart of the crystal.

The researchers propose that the most likely candidates for this nanocluster include buckminsterfullerene (C60), a cage-like ball of carbon atoms, or polyhexacyclooctadecane (C18H12), a molecule made of carbon and hydrogen.

The team suspects the crystals formed under the high temperature and pressure conditions created by the meteor breaking apart, although the exact mechanism remains unclear.

In the future, scientists hope to track other meteorite dust samples from other space rocks to see if these crystals are a common by-product of meteor eruptions or something unique from the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion.

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