Mineral 'never seen in nature' found in meteorite

                      

A mineral never seen in nature has been found in a scan of a meteorite found by the side of a road in Australia.

The Wedderburn meteorite is a 210 g piece of space rock which was found near a remote mining town in Victoria in 1951.

Caltech (California Institute of Technology) researchers have scanned the rock and found a mineral – ‘edscottite’ – which has never been seen in nature.

Researchers now believe that the space rock came from the core of another planet, destroyed in an ancient collision .

A team from Caltech scanned a small portion of the meteorite for rare minerals in 2018, and found a mineral seen in iron smelters, but never in nature.

Dr Stuart Mills, Museums Victoria’s senior curator of geosciences, said: ‘This meteorite had an abundance of carbon in it.

‘As it slowly cooled down, the iron and carbon came together and fo rmed this mineral. ‘

The find is quite unique, Dr Mills told The Age.

) Dr Mills said, ‘We have discovered 500, 000 to 600, 000 minerals in the lab, but fewer than 6000 that nature’s done itself. ‘

The mineral is named after cosmochemist Edward Scott of the University of Hawaii.

– This article first appeared onYahoo