Never-Before-Seen Mineral Discovered Inside Mysterious Wedderburn Meteorite In Australia

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – Scientists have encountered a never-before-seen mineral that was found inside a meteorite in a remote Australian gold rush town.

Researchers have tried for years to unravel the mystery of the Wedderburn meteorite that is believed to have emanated from an old planet, which no longer exists.

We may now be closer to unlock some the mysterious space object’s secrets.

The Wedderburn meteorite. Credit: Museums Victoria, CC BY 4.0

The mineral,  discovered by a team of researchers from CalTech, lead by mineralogist Chi Ma has been named ‘edscottite Fe₅C₂,’ after Edward Scott, a renowned cosmochemist from the University of Hawaii.

As reported in the study, scientists analyzed the Wedderburn meteorite and verified the first natural occurrence of what they call ‘edscottite’ that is a rare form of iron-carbide mineral that’s never been found in nature.

The red and black is very rare because it originates from another planet that is long gone.

The discovery of a previously unknown mineral is very exciting. As Geology In reports, “Microscopically, it appears as small white crystals.

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This mineral is a combination of carbon and iron atoms, set together in a particular pattern. “This meteorite had an abundance of carbon in it. And as it slowly cooled down, the iron and carbon came together and formed this mineral,” said Dr. Stuart Mills, Museums Victoria’s senior curator of geosciences.”

“We have discovered 500,000 to 600,000 minerals in the lab, but fewer than 6,000 that nature’s done itself,” Museums Victoria senior curator of geosciences Stuart Mills, who wasn’t involved with the new study, told The Age.

Dr Stuart Mills, who has personally discovered almost 100 minerals, examines the Wedderburn meteorite. Museums Victoria

How the edscottite ended up in Wedderburn is unknown, but planetary scientist Geoffrey Bonning from Australian National University suggests the mineral could have formed in the heated, pressurized core of an ancient planet.

Science Alert reports, “long ago, this ill-fated, edscottite-producing planet could have suffered some kind of colossal cosmic collision – involving another planet, or a moon, or an asteroid – and been blasted apart, with the fragmented chunks of this destroyed world being flung across time and space, Bonning told The Age.

Millions of years later, the thinking goes, one such fragment landed by chance just outside Wedderburn – and our understanding of the Universe is the richer for it.”

The Wedderburn meteorite made a million years-long journey, before it was sent on a collision course heading straight towards Earth.

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff