A strange crystal that scientists have never seen before. Strange crystals under an electron microscope. Taskaev On February 15, 2013, a mysterious fireball streaked over Chelyabinsk in southern Russia. According to estimates, scientists believe that this is an asteroid with a di

A strange crystal that scientists have never seen before.

Strange crystals under the electron microscope . Taskaev

On February 15, 2013, a mysterious fireball streaked across the sky over Chelyabinsk, in southern Russia. According to estimates, scientists believe that this was an asteroid with a diameter of about 18 meters and a weight of about 11,000 tons. It entered the earth's atmosphere at a speed of 67,000 kilometers per hour and exploded and burned at an altitude of 23.3 kilometers above the ground, scattering debris. in the surrounding area. Many people regard the Chelyabinsk incident as a warning from nature, reminding us that the risk of the earth being hit by an asteroid is always present.

Screenshot of the witness video of the Chelyabinsk incident.

The Chelyabinsk incident is the largest asteroid explosion that has occurred in the Earth's atmosphere since the Tunguska incident in 1908. Its explosion yield is equivalent to 30 times that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The strong light emitted during the explosion once exceeded sun. The shock wave generated by the explosion shattered many windows and caused damage to some buildings and injured approximately 1,200 people to varying degrees. Since the incident had a relatively strong psychological impact on the witnesses, there are many conjectures and opinions circulating in society about the incident.

Recently, after a lapse of 9 years, some scientists discovered that the dust contained a crystalline substance that humans had never seen before while analyzing the dust fragments left in the snow after the explosion of the meteorite.

Scientists used ordinary microscopes and electron microscopes to observe the collected meteorite dust, and found that there were two crystals with very strange shapes. One of them resembles a spherical shell, the other resembles a hexagonal rod. X-ray probing results show that they are all composed of multiple layers of graphite (a variant of carbon), but at the center of each crystal there is a core made of nanoclusters.

The researchers said the composition of this nanocluster may be buckminsterfullerene (C₆₀) or polyhexacyclooctane (C₁₈H₁₂). The molecule of buckminsterfullerene is a cage-like sphere made of 60 carbon atoms, which is a hydrocarbon .

Researchers speculate that these crystals may have been formed in the high-temperature and high-pressure environment when meteorites disintegrated, but how they were formed is unknown. It is currently unknown whether this strange crystal is produced by all meteorite falls, or whether it is unique to the Chelyabinsk incident.

Computer simulation results show that after the Chelyabinsk incident, a huge dust cloud appeared in the earth's atmosphere. NASA

Reference
Exotic carbon microcrystals in meteoritic dust of the Chelyabinsk superbolide: experimental investigations and theoretical scenarios of their formation
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjp/s13360-022-02768-7