Rare extraterrestrial hexagonal diamonds have been discovered by Australian scientists in four meteorites found in northwest Africa.

The mysterious tiny diamonds are believed to have been formed when an ancient dwarf planet in our solar system collided with a large asteroid about 4.5 billion years ago, with some of the fragments ending up on Earth.

Diamonds are called lonsdaleites in honor of the famous British crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale, the first female member of the British Royal Society of Sciences. Like ordinary diamonds, they are made of carbon, but their atoms are arranged in a hexagonal structure rather than a cubic one.

Researchers from Monas and RMIT Universities and an Australian consortium led by geology professor Andy Tomkins who made related publication in the Journal of the US National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) it was reported that the hexagonal structure of “alien” diamonds makes them about 60% harder than conventional cubic diamonds created in the depths of our planet.

The discovery, which put an end to doubts about whether such material really exists on Earth, was made using sophisticated electron microscopy techniques. It is hoped that if it becomes possible to produce such diamonds synthetically, then in the future they can be used for various industrial applications, such as the creation of tiny high-strength mechanical parts, blades, etc.

Earth was first hinted at with hexagonal diamonds in the 1960s, when related crystals were found in meteorites in the US and India. But they were too small – nanometers in size – so it was difficult to confirm that such hexagonal diamonds actually exist in nature.

This time, thanks to today’s state of the art scientific instruments, larger crystals (on the micrometer scale, or 1,000 times larger than the nanometer scale) have been found inside the meteorites, proving beyond a doubt that lonsdaleites are real.

Source: RES-IPE