The remains of a planet lost on Earth: the meteorite full of diamonds

The apparent order that resides in our nearby Universe, with its mathematically perfect orbital ellipses, was never so accurate. About 4,500 million years ago, the Solar System came into the world from the most absolute chaos. A cluster of mass and fragments of rock and dust, called protoplanets, formed a circle around the Astro Rey and collided with each other like cosmic billiard balls. These clashes forged the rocky planets we know today: Mercury, Venus, Mars and, of course, the one in which we live, the Earth. In turn, astronomers believe that the moon was formed from the remains by such an impact between Earth and a protoplanet they called Theia. Now, scientists have discovered diamonds inside a meteorite whose origin can come from one of these celestial bodies that formed the planets that today make up our Solar System.

These precious stones were found in 2008 in pieces of space rock that fell on the deserts of the African country of Sudan, reports The New York Times. Astronomers have hypothesized that dozens of budding planets, from the moon to Mars, formed, separated and rejoined in a series of violent collisions that eventually created the rocky planets orbiting the sun today. , according to Ian Sample in 'The Guardian'. In fact, it has been a miracle "fallen from the sky" (and never better said) that has precipitated that the Alamahata Sitta reach us. Perhaps, this implies a greater understanding of the origin of the Solar System and an approach to the nature of the neighboring planets that look at us from above: small, beautiful, silent, barely perceptible and flickering in the midst of darkness.

If confirmed the findings, the meteorite named Alahamata Sitta will be the first and the only rest of all those protoplanets that formed the Earth. This material, scientists predict, will open a window to the knowledge of the cosmic conditions of the system to which we belong. "We have in our own hands a piece from a previous planet that revolved around the Sun before the end of the formation of the Solar System," confirms Philippe Gillet, planetary scientist at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. "Now it's time to do archeology and try to decipher the history of the formation of our neighboring planets and of the Earth itself," he corroborated.

Farhang Nabiei, Gillet's research partner, made the discovery of the meteorite exactly one decade ago, while taking high-resolution images of the Nubian desert in Sudan. "These samples come from a time that we have no access to," admits Farghan Nabiei to The Washington Post. "We are part of these protoplanets, in which the hi is embedded

Space rock is classified as ureilite and has several different types of embedded minerals, in addition to diamonds. Their gems, of nanometric size, turn out to be much larger than any other diamond found in the interior of any known aerolite. After conducting an inspection on the mineral, the team of scientists perceived that the diamonds were not crystalline, but were plagued by small imperfections, made of chromite, phosphate and sulfides of iron and nickel, according to Dr. Gillet.

The key to Almahata Sitta is that it is not made of the primitive material that made up the solar nebula, nor is it as well mixed and baked as the rocks that come from modern and modern planets. Unlike other meteorites with which they can trace their provenance, these rocks do not have a known source. They seem to have been formed from bodies that no longer exist. "What for a jeweler is an imperfection, for me it becomes very useful," explains Gillet. "It has a chemistry that has no equivalent in today's Solar System," he said.

The impurities in the meteorite diamonds seem to show a really turbulent past. The size and chemistry of the diamonds suggests that they were formed under a very intense pressure, about 20 giga-pascals. To give you an approximate idea of ​​such a force, it is close to the pressure existing 650 kilometers below the Earth's surface, where the upper mantle transits towards the lower mantle. According to the report published in the magazine 'Nature Communications', the Swiss team concludes that diamonds were forged in the depths of the surface of a totally unknown world.

"The main body of the meteorite would have to have been a planet at least as big as Mercury or Mars," Nabiei states in The Washington Post. The chemistry of these imperfections has made them conclude that it is the cosmic remains of a protoplaneta that collided with another and ejected debris that ended up in the asteroid belt, where it wandered for billions of years until it hit the Earth.