A strange crystal that could be older than our own planet fell on the Kamchatka Peninsula (Russia) enveloped in a meteorite and, for several years, was part of a collection of minerals stored in a museum. Now, an investigation carried out by scientists at Princeton University has demonstrated the extraterrestrial origin of this finding, which is also the only known sample of a quasicrystal formed under natural conditions.
The internal structure of quasicrystals, apparently normal minerals, has long fascinated scientists as it does not follow the usual symmetry patterns. Until now they had only been produced synthetically in the laboratory, and it was thought that they were very unstable and would revert to normal crystals over time. In fact, studying these quasicrystals earned Daniel Shechtman the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011.
Scientists at Princeton University began an intensive search for quasicrystalline structure in minerals around the world some years ago. In this way they found a rock that, after spending years in a Soviet government laboratory from whom a private collector in Amsterdam later bought the sample, ended up stored in the Museum of Natural History in Florence (Italy). In this mineral, the researchers identified the quasicrystal sought and were able to verify its formation under natural conditions.
The surprising thing about this mineral found in the Koryak Mountains (Russia), is that it is an object formed, surely, outside our planet. This was confirmed by the scientists after verifying, among other evidences, that the quasicrystal was embedded in stishovite, a mineral variety that has only been found in meteorites since it requires pressure and temperature conditions for its formation that are much higher than those that exist in naturally on Earth.
The extraterrestrial quasicrystal could have formed more than 4.5 million years ago, a time when our Solar System was just forming, so it seems that the adventures that the mineral went through since its landing on Earth are only a very small part of its full story.
