Scientists have discovered two never-before-seen minerals inside a 15-ton meteorite that crashed in Africa after analysis of a 70-gram slice of the cosmic object.
The massive meteorite was first found in Somalia in 2020 and is considered the ninth-largest meteorite ever found on Earth. The curator of the University of Alberta's meteorite collection, Chris Herd, received samples of the large meteorite in order to classify it.
Newly-Discovered Minerals
While Herd was examining the sample that he was given, something unusual caught his eye, which was some parts that were not identifiable by a microscope. After finding the parts, he sought advice from the head of the university's Electron Microprobe Laboratory, Andrew Locock, because the latter has experience describing new minerals.
In a statement, Herd said that on the first day that Locock conducted analyses on the sample, he got at least two new minerals inside. He added that the finding was "phenomenal" because most of the time, it takes quite a bit of effort to say that something was a new mineral, as per CNN.
One mineral was named "elaliite" which was derived from the space object itself, which was named "El Ali" because it was found near the town of El Ali in central Somalia. The second was named "elkinstantonite" after Lindy Elkins-Tanton, who is the vice president of Arizona State University's Interplanetary Initiative.
NASA said that Elkins-Tanton is a regents professor in Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration and the principal investigator of the space agency's Psyche mission. The mission is a journey to a metal-rich asteroid that is orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter.
According to BBC, native Somalians used to call the meteorite Nightfall and believed that it was documented in poems, songs, and dances that stretch back five generations. In the modern era, it is used to sharpen knives.
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Massive 15-Ton Meteorite
Herd said that naming one of the minerals after Elkins-Tanton was due to them doing a lot of work on how the cores of planets form and how these iron-nickel cores form. He said that it made sense to name the mineral after them to recognize their contributions to science.
Now, a third but not yet identified mineral is being analyzed by the Arizona State University's researchers who are hoping to get more samples of the large meteorite. This is not only to see what else they could discover but also how it could be used on Earth.
Herd, referencing the "exciting" research, said that whenever a new mineral is discovered, material scientists are interested because of the potential uses they could have in a wide range of things in society.
He added that the university's researchers will continue analyzing the newly-discovered minerals to draw more insight from the conditions inside the 15-ton meteorite when it formed. However, a separate report noted that future scientific insights from the massive meteorite could prove to be difficult. This is because the cosmic object has recently been moved to China in search of a potential buyer and its sale could limit researchers' access to samples of the space rock, News18 reported.
