Extraterrestrial Origin: Bizarre Crystal Zipped Here From Outer Space
A sample of a bizarre crystal once considered unnatural may have arrived on Earth 15,000 years ago, having hitched a ride on a meteorite, a new study suggests. The research strengthens the evidence that this strange "quasicrystal" is extraterrestrial in origin. Read more
Nobel prize-winning crystals fell to earth in meteorites
In 2009, Steinhardt and Luca Bindi at the University of Florence in Italy identified them in a tiny rock sample thought to be from the Koryak mountains in the far east of Russia. Tests on that only known natural sample suggested it came from a meteorite. The claim had its doubters, so Steinhardt organised an expedition to Russia to hunt for more examples. His team panned one and half tonnes of sediment by hand, and found nine grains containing quasicrystals. Read more
Theoretical physicist Paul Steinhardt did not expect to spend last summer travelling across spongy tundra to a remote gold-mining region in north-eastern Russia. But that is where he spent three weeks tracing the origins of the world's only known natural example of a quasicrystal - an exotic type of structure discovered in 1982 in a synthetic material by Dan Shechtman, a materials scientist at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa who netted the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the finding. Read more
Examples of a crystal previously thought to be impossible in nature may have come from space, a study shows. Quasicrystals have an unusual structure - in between those of crystals and glasses. Until two years ago, quasicrystals had only been created in the lab - then geologists found them in rocks from Russia's Koryak mountains. Read more
Exotic Quasicrystal May Represent New Type of Mineral A team of researchers says it has found in a Russian mineral sample the first natural example of a quasicrystal, an unusual material that displays some of the properties of a crystal but boasts a more intricate and complex structure. Since quasicrystals were characterised 25 years ago, numerous versions have been cooked up in the laboratory, but a natural example would indicate that nature's products are more diverse than previously thought.