Space is an amazing place that can surprise any even the most sophisticated scientist. So, a meteorite from the small Australian town of Wedderburn for almost 60 years has been the most unexplored mineral on the planet, the approximate composition of which scientists have been trying to figure out since 1951. According to the sciencealert.com portal, a small 210-gram piece of a strange-looking stone that once fell from the sky is still a mystery to modern science. Or, perhaps, he has already ceased to be her?
What does the world's most unexplored mineral look like?
The Wedderburn meteorite is a mysterious mineral that may be almost the only witness to an ancient catastrophe that affected several planets of the solar system at once. In a study published in August this year, scientists investigated a meteorite found in Wedderburn, first confirming the possibility of a natural occurrence of what they call "edscottite," a rare mixture of an iron-carbide mineral never seen before on Earth.
Since the possibility of the cosmic origin of the Wedderburn meteorite was first considered only a few years ago, the distinctive black and red rocks have been analyzed by a large number of research groups relatively recently, with more than a third of the remains of the original sample still unexplored, being in the geological collections of museums in Australia.
All the rest of the material was selected in a series of pieces, extracted to analyze what the meteorite was made of. Analysis of the unique substance revealed the presence of traces of iron and gold in its composition, as well as more rare minerals such as schreibersite and troilite.
The discovery of edscottite in the composition of the mineral, which was named after the famous cosmochemist Edward Scott from the University of Hawaii, is a very important event in the modern scientific world, if only because never before has such a unique atomic formulation of a mineral been discovered naturally. At the same time, the synthetic version of this mineral has long been known to mankind, formed during the smelting of the well-known iron.
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According to planetary scientist Jeffrey Bonning of the Australian National University, a fragment of a natural Edscott could be in the immediate vicinity of the Australian countryside in the powerful explosion of the hot core of an ancient planet. According to the researcher, the once long-unknown planet of the solar system could undergo a cosmic collision of colossal force with the participation of another planet or a large asteroid. The fragments of this destroyed world fell to Earth, thus preserving the memory of events that took place millions and billions of years before the emergence of mankind.