The rare gem comes from space.
Staff at RMIT University of Technology in Australia have dubbed the special substance found in meteorites that crashed in Africa lonsdaleite. According to the discovery published in PNAS, the journal of the American Academy of Sciences, lonsdaleite is a rare form of diamond in which carbon atoms form a hexagonal lattice, which is why it is about 58 percent harder than diamond, known as the world’s hardest material.
According to RMIT’s Dougal McCulloch, Lonsdalite may have formed 4.5 billion years ago when an asteroid collided with a large asteroid.
There is strong evidence for this method of formation, for example, the mineral contains supercritical gases that could have formed after a catastrophic impact
McCulloch noted.
According to Monash University geologist Andy Tomkins, one of the authors of the paper presenting the discovery, since the material was not created during the impact, but after that, there is a possibility that we could also produce it artificially under industrial conditions. The extra hard materials will be of great use as machine parts.
