Unprecedented crystals found in fully preserved meteorite dust
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Researchers have discovered an unprecedented type of crystal hidden in small particles of completely preserved meteorite dust. Dust was left behind by a giant space rock that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia nine years ago.
February 15, 2013, asteroid Entered 59 feet (18 meters) wide and 12,125 tons (11,000 meters) in weight EarthAtmosphere at approximately 41,600 mph (66,950 km / h). Fortunately, the meteorite exploded about 14.5 miles (23.3 km) above the city of Chelyabinsk in southern Russia, flooding it with small meteorites and avoiding a huge single collision with the surface.Experts at the time held this event Major wake-up calls The danger that asteroids bring to the planet.
The Chelyabinsk meteor explosion was the largest of its kind in the Earth’s atmosphere since the 1908 Tunguska event.Exploded with 30 times the power of a swaying atomic bomb Hiroshimaaccording to NASA (Opens in a new tab).. Video footage (Opens in a new tab) The state of the event showed that the rocks of the universe were burning in a moment of light. SunAccording to Live Science’s sister site, it damaged buildings and injured about 1,200 people in the cities below before creating a powerful sonic boom that broke glass. Space.com (Opens in a new tab)..
In a new study, researchers analyzed some of the small pieces of space rock left after the meteorite exploded, known as meteorite dust. Meteors usually produce a small amount of dust when they burn out, but scientists because small particles are too small to be found, are scattered by the wind, fall into water, or are polluted by the environment. Will be lost. However, according to NASA, after the Chelyabinsk meteorite exploded, a large amount of dust floated in the atmosphere for more than four days, eventually raining on the surface of the earth. And fortunately, layers of snow that fell just before and after the event trapped and preserved some dust samples until scientists could quickly recover them.
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Researchers came across a new type of crystal while examining dust spots with a standard microscope. One of these small structures was big enough to be seen under a microscope, but when one team member looked into the eyepieces, it happened to be in focus on one center of the slide. rice field. If it had been anywhere else, the team would probably have missed it. Science news (Opens in a new tab)..
After analyzing the dust with a more powerful electron microscope, researchers found more of these crystals and examined them in more detail. But still, “finding crystals using an electron microscope was quite difficult due to their small size,” the researchers wrote in a paper published on May 7. European Physical Journal Plus (Opens in a new tab)..
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New crystals have emerged in two different forms. Researchers have written that quasi-spherical or “nearly spherical” shells and hexagonal rods are both “unique morphological features.”
Further analysis using X-rays revealed that the crystals were made up of a layer of graphite. carbon It is made from an overlapping sheet of atoms commonly used in pencils and surrounds a central nanocluster in the center of the crystal. Researchers have found that the most likely candidates for these nanoclusters are buckminsterfullerene (C60), a cage-like ball of carbon atoms, or polyhexacyclooctadecane, a molecule made from carbon and hydrogen. It is proposed to be (C18H12).
The exact mechanism is still unknown, but the team suspects crystals formed under high-temperature, high-pressure conditions produced by the collapse of a meteor. In the future, scientists will track other samples of meteorite dust from other cosmic rocks to determine if these crystals are a common by-product of meteorite collapse or unique to the Chelyabinsk meteorite explosion. I want to confirm.
Originally published on Live Science.
Unprecedented crystals found in fully preserved meteorite dust
Source link Unprecedented crystals found in fully preserved meteorite dust
