A mineral that is believed to be the most abundant an Earth has finally gotten a name.
The mineral, now called bridgmanite, usually exists too deep within the Earth to be directly observed, an American Geophysical Union blog post reported.
"The most abundant mineral of the earth now has an official name," Chi Ma, a mineralogist and director of the Geological and Planetary Sciences division's Analytical Facility at Caltech, said in a Caltech news release.
The new mineral name was approved on June 2 after scientists successfully characterized a natural sample for the first time, the blog post reported.
"This [find] fills a vexing gap in the taxonomy of minerals," Oliver Tschauner, an associate research professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas who characterized the mineral, said in an email, the blog post reported.
Researchers believe the mineral exists in an interior region that reaches all the way down to the bottom of the transition zone of the Earth's mantle and the planet's core-mantle boundary at depths as far down as 1,802 miles.
Observing the transition zone directly is a far-off dream; the team discovered this deep region by looking at the way earthquake waves travel though the Earth. It is the point where mineral structures experience changes at an atomic level as a result of immense pressure and high temperatures.
Pressure and temperature experiments suggest (Mg,Fe)SiO3, now called bridgmanite, is the most dominant material in the lower mantle,
Researchers looked at a sample from the Tenham meteorite, which fell from space and landed in Australia in 1879.
The 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite was believed to have collided with asteroids in space, creating high-pressure conditions similar to that of the Earth's mantle.
The researchers used a process called synchrotron X-ray diffraction mapping to find traces of the mineral in the meteorite. They then looked at the mineral using a high-resolution scanning electron microscope and synchrotron diffraction.
After half a decade of experiments the researchers were finally able to reveal the chemical composition of the crystal structure.
"It is a really cool discovery," Ma said in the news release. "Our finding of natural bridgmanite not only provides new information on shock conditions and impact processes on small bodies in the solar system, but the tiny bridgmanite found in a meteorite could also help investigations of phase transformation mechanisms in the deep Earth. "
