An Ultra-rare Crystal Is Found In A Meteorite, It's A Quasicrystal From Outer Space

HARD SCIENCE
An Ultra-Rare Crystal

Is Found in a Meteorite,

Revealing a Bizarre Form

of Matter
It's a quasicrystal from outer space.
June JavelosaDecember 9th 2016
Ultra-Rare Specimen

A team led by Luca Bindi, a geologist from the University of Florence,
has found an ultra-rare quasicrystal just a few micrometres wide
in a meteorite that landed in Russia five years ago.

The discovery has been detailed in Scientific Reports.

Two other quasicrystals have already been discovered
in this particular meteorite, but the latest is different
from its predecessors in both structure and chemical composition.

This new quasicrystal is composed of aluminum, copper,
and iron atoms structured in an arrangement very similar
to the pentagon-based pattern of a soccer ball,
a first of its kind in nature.

“What is encouraging is that we have already found three different types
of quasicrystals in the same meteorite,
and this new one has a chemical composition
that has never been seen for a quasicrystal,”
says Paul Steinhardt, a team member from Princeton,
in an interview with Motherboard.

“That suggests there is more to be found,
perhaps more quasicrystals that we did not know were possible before.”

Image Credit: J.W. Evans, The Ames Laboratory, US Department of Energy
What Is A Quasicrystal?

At the time of their discovery in the 1980s,
quasicrystals defied what we thought we knew about crystallography.

Regular crystals such as diamonds and snowflakes are made up of atoms
in almost-perfect symmetry, while polycrystals such as metals
and ice have more random structures that closely resemble
amorphous solids like glass and most plastics.

Quasicrystals, however, have an ordered yet never repeating
arrangement of atoms.

Their unique atomic structures fuse the symmetrical properties
of regular crystals with the chaos of amorphous solids.

Quasicrystals can easily be artificially synthesized in labs,
and in the three decades since their discovery,
scientists have found many useful applications for them,
incorporating quasicrystals into LEDs, frying pans, and other objects.

Their rarity in nature, however, makes the study of organic quasicrystals
still largely uncharted territory, so this new discovery
could tell us a lot about this strange form of matter.

https://futurism.com/spacex-says-they-will-be-ready-for-takeoff-in-january

 

A quasiperiodic crystal, or quasicrystal, is a structure that is ordered but not periodic.

A quasicrystalline pattern can continuously fill all available space,

but it lacks translational symmetry.

 

Rotational symmetry of order n,
also called n-fold rotational symmetry,
or discrete rotational symmetry
of the nth order, with respect to a particular point (in 2D)
or axis (in 3D) means that rotation by an angle of 360°/n
(180°, 120°, 90°, 72°, 60°, 51 ³⁄₇°, etc.) does not change the object.

 

3D Space in a 4D Quasicrystal





Quantum Gravity Research
Published on Mar 17, 2017


This visualization shows what happens when a 3-dimensional space
passes through a 4-dimensional quasicrystal.

Within the intersection there exist hundreds of icosahedrons
and dodecahedrons which blip off and on as they pass into and out of our 3D world.

The animation was created by Quantum Gravity Research's geometer
and visualization specialist Dugan Hammock.

The animation was created in Maya from models created in Mathematica.