Diamonds in a Meteorite May Be a Lost Planet’s Fragments

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/science/diamonds-meteorite-lost-planet.html

Source:  By Nicholas St. Fleur, The New York Times

Excerpt: In 2008, chunks of space rock crashed in the deserts of Sudan. Diamonds discovered inside one of the recovered meteorites may have come from a destroyed planet that orbited our sun billions of years ago, scientists said on Tuesday. If confirmed, they say, it would be the first time anyone has recovered fragments from one of our solar system’s so-called “lost” planets. ... Dr. Gillet’s colleague Farhang Nabiei made the discovery while taking high-resolution images of a meteorite that had landed ...about a decade ago. The space rock is classified as ureilite, a type of rare meteorite that has embedded within it several different types of minerals. And inside this one, they found diamonds. The nano-sized gems were ...far from crystal clear. They were riddled with tiny imperfections, called inclusions, made of chromite, phosphate and iron-nickel sulfides. ...“What for a jeweler is an imperfection becomes for me something that is very useful because it tells me about the history of the diamond,” said Dr. Gillet. “It has a chemistry which has no equivalent in the solar system today, in terms of planets,” he said. ...because the chemistry of the inclusions did not match what is known on planets in today’s solar system, they think the diamonds came from a protoplanet that existed between 4.54 and 4.57 billion years ago.... 

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