Two never-before-seen minerals have been found in a meteorite weighing about 15 tons. The meteorite was discovered in Somalia in 2020 and is the ninth largest ever found, the University of Alberta, Canada announced.
It was Chris Herd, curator of the university’s meteorite collection, who accounted for the minerals. While analyzing samples of the space rock, he noticed something unusual that caught his attention. He couldn’t immediately identify what it was, so he sought help from Andrew Locock, director of the University’s Electron Microprobe Laboratory.
“The first day he did an analysis he told me, ‘You’ve got at least two new minerals in there,'” Herd said. quoted by CNN🇧🇷 “It was phenomenal.”
The name of one of the minerals, “elaliite”, derives from the space object itself, which is called the “El Ali” meteorite because it was found near the town of El Ali in central Somalia.
Herd nicknamed the second “elkinstantonite” after Lindy Elkins-Tanton, vice president of the Interplanetary Initiative at the University of Arizona.
“Lindy has done a lot of work on how the cores of planets form and how the cores of planets form,” Herd said. “It makes sense to name a mineral after you and recognize your contributions to science.”
The approval of the two new minerals by the International Mineralogical Association in November of this year “indicates that the work is solid,” said Oliver Tschauner, a geoscientist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
“Any time we find a new mineral, it means that the chemistry of the rock was different than what had been found before,” Herd explained. “That’s what’s exciting: In this particular meteorite, we have two minerals that are new to science”.
Both minerals are made up of iron phosphates. “Phosphates in iron meteorites are secondary products: they form through the oxidation of phosphides, which are rare primary components of iron meteorites,” Tschauner said.
The “El Ali” meteorite, from which these new minerals came, will have been sent to China in search of a buyer.
The researchers are still analyzing the minerals to find out what condition the meteorite was in when it formed.
Source: TSF
