mona Posted January 17, 2018 Share Posted January 17, 2018 Extraterrestrial diamond-studded 'Hypatia’ stone found in Egypt is unlike anything seen in our solar system ever before Hypatia was named for the first female Western mathematician and astronomer The alien rock may have formed when the solar system was still taking shape The chunk of meteor may have formed from the same cosmic dust cloud Its unique chemicals challenge our current model of the solar systems formation By TIM COLLINS FOR MAILONLINE PUBLISHED: 17:55 GMT, 12 January 2018 | UPDATED: 18:40 GMT, 12 January 2018 A chunk of rock which fell to Earth and was discovered in the deserts of Egypt may hold the key to our understanding of how the solar system was formed. The Hypatia stone, named for the first Western woman mathematician and astronomer, contains minerals unlike anything seen before in our solar system. Experts say the extraterrestrial object may have formed at a time when the universe was still taking shape and may predate the sun and its surrounding planets. It contains micro-mineral compounds not found elsewhere in our region of space, or in known meteorites and comets, and has the potential to rewrite the history books. * * * * * * The Hypatia stone, which is broken into fragments, contains never before discovered forms of minerals. The discovery was made by researchers from the University of Johannesburg (UJ), who used advanced scanning techniques to analyse Hypatia's structure. The original rock that fell to Earth must have been at least several metres in diameter, they say, but disintegrated into small fragments of which the Hypatia stone is one. The stone itself is also broken into smaller sections, described by the researchers as pebbles, around one centimetre (0.4 inches) in size or smaller. Members of the team immediately noticed that the structure of the hunk of minerals, discovered in southwest Egypt in 1996, looked nothing like that of any known meteorites discovered on the planet. The ratios of chemicals present in the fragment was distinct from anything else previously studied. Their investigation led to two possible explanations : The first suggests that Hypatia is a surviving fragment of a meteor that existed before our solar system was formed, only to be captured by Earth's gravity millions of years later. The second is that the meteor chunk formed from the same cosmic dust cloud as the solar system. If the latter is true, this would call into question our current model of how this process occurred, which posits a nebula of equally dispersed elements that went on to form the celestial bodies found in our corner of the cosmos. Dr Marco Andreoli, a research fellow at the school of geosciences at the University of the Witwatersrand, and a member of the Hypatia research team said: "When Hypatia was first found to be extraterrestrial, it was a sensation, but these latest results are opening up even bigger questions about its origins." "In the grains within Hypatia the ratios of elements to each other are completely different from that calculated for the planet Earth or measured in known types of meteorites." "As such these inclusions are unique within our solar system." * Hypatia of Alexandria was a leading light in mathematics and astronomy in the fourth century AD, and was killed for her futuristic ideas by religious zealots. * The stone which bears her name was discovered in December 1996 by Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat Barakat, who was researching Libyan Desert Glass. The substance appears to be similar to sea glass that forms in Earth's oceans, and can be found strewn across the eastern Sahara, in the deserts of eastern Libya and western Egypt. Geologists believe it may have formed 28 million years ago by a meteorite impact. Dr Barakat immediately recognised the unique significance of the glossy stone, which is lined with microscopic diamonds. In 2013, Professor Jan Kramers of the UJ research team and his co-authors announced that Hypatia was definitely not from Earth. By 2015, other research teams had announced that the stone was not part of any known types of meteorite or comet, based on noble gas and nuclear probe analyses. In the latest study, Professor Kramers and colleagues used a range of high-tech scans to probe the stone's interior. They compare the rock's internal structure to a fruit cake that has fallen off a shelf and into some flour and cracked. The mineral matrix that makes up most of the rock is represented by the cake dough, while mineral grains embedded in it are like glace cherries and nuts. The flour is the secondary materials that Hypatia stone picked up when it hit the planet. Their study revealed that, while the chemical elements, carbon and silicon and aluminium and iron, that make up Hypatia are the same, the ratios are all wrong. The full results of the study were published in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. video : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5258231/Incredible-alien-rock-Hypatia-predate-solar-system.html#v-5328881819599194327 SOURCE Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vdogeek Posted January 17, 2018 Share Posted January 17, 2018 Good read! Thank you @mona Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mona Posted January 17, 2018 Author Share Posted January 17, 2018 More ingeresting details provided by : University of Johannesburg ........................................................................................... Mineral structure The internal structure of the Hypatia pebble is somewhat like a fruitcake that has fallen off a shelf into some flour and cracked on impact, says Prof Jan Kramers, lead researcher of the study published in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta on 28 Dec 2017. "We can think of the badly mixed dough of a fruit cake representing the bulk of the Hypatia pebble, what we called two mixed 'matrices' in geology terms. The glace cherries and nuts in the cake represent the mineral grains found in Hypatia 'inclusions'. And the flour dusting the cracks of the fallen cake represent the 'secondary materials' we found in the fractures in Hypatia, which are from Earth," he says. The original extraterrestrial rock that fell to Earth must have been at least several meters in diameter, but disintegrated into small fragments of which the Hypatia stone is one. Weird matrix Straight away, the Hypatia mineral matrix (represented by fruitcake dough), looks nothing like that of any known meteorites, the rocks that fall from space onto Earth every now and then. "If it were possible to grind up the entire planet Earth to dust in a huge mortar and pestle, we would get dust with on average a similar chemical composition as chondritic meteorites," says Kramers. "In chondritic meteorites, we expect to see a small amount of carbon{C} and a good amount of silicon (Si). But Hypatia's matrix has a massive amount of carbon and an unusually small amount of silicon." "Even more unusual, the matrix contains a high amount of very specific carbon compounds, called polyaromatic hydrocarbons, or PAH, a major component of interstellar dust, which existed even before our solar system was formed. Interstellar dust is also found in comets and meteorites that have not been heated up for a prolonged period in their history," adds Kramers. In another twist, most (but not all) of the PAH in the Hypatia matrix has been transformed into diamonds smaller than one micrometer, which are thought to have been formed in the shock of impact with the Earth's atmosphere or surface. These diamonds made Hypatia resistant to weathering so that it is preserved for analysis from the time it arrived on Earth. Weirder grains never found before When researcher Georgy Belyanin analyzed the mineral grains in the inclusions in Hypatia, (represented by the nuts and cherries of a fruitcake), a number of most surprising chemical elements showed up. The micro-mineral analyses on the extraterrestrial Hypatia stone cast significant questions on a widely-held view about the primitive pre-solar dust cloud which our Sun, Earth and other planets were formed from. Jan Kramers and Georgy Belyanin from the PPM Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg take us through the exotic nature of the minerals in Hypatia, and how the microdiamonds in a chip from the pebble ripped up a manmade polishing disk coated with industrial diamond within minutes. Credit: Ms Therese van Wyk, University of Johannesburg. "The aluminum occurs in pure metallic form, on its own, not in a chemical compound with other elements. As a comparison, gold occurs in nuggets, but aluminum never does. This occurrence is extremely rare on Earth and the rest of our solar system, as far as is known in science," says Belyanin. "We also found silver iodine phosphide and moissanite (silicon carbide) grains, again in highly unexpected forms. The grains are the first documented to be found in situ (as is) without having to first dissolve the surrounding rock with acid," adds Belyanin. "There are also grains of a compound consisting of mainly nickel and phosphorus, with very little iron; a mineral composition never observed before on Earth or in meteorites," he adds. Dr Marco Andreoli, a Research Fellow at the School of Geosciences at the University of the Witwatersrand, and a member of the Hypatia research team says, "When Hypatia was first found to be extraterrestrial, it was a sensation, but these latest results are opening up even bigger questions about its origins". Unique minerals in our solar system Taken together, the ancient unheated PAH carbon as well as the phosphides, the metallic aluminum, and the moissanite suggest that Hypatia is an assembly of unchanged pre-solar material. That means, matter that existed in space before our Sun, the Earth and the other planets in our solar system were formed. Supporting the pre-solar concept is the weird composition of the nickel-phosphorus-iron grains found in the Hypatia inclusions. These three chemical elements are interesting because they belong to the subset of chemical elements heavier than carbon and nitrogen which form the bulk of all the rocky planets. "In the grains within Hypatia the ratios of these three elements to each other are completely different from that calculated for the planet Earth or measured in known types of meteorites. As such these inclusions are unique within our solar system," adds Belyanin. "We think the nickel-phosphorus-iron grains formed pre-solar, because they are inside the matrix, and are unlikely to have been modified by shock such as collision with the Earth's atmosphere or surface, and also because their composition is so alien to our solar system", he adds. "Was the bulk of Hypatia, the matrix, also formed before our solar system? Probably not, because you need a dense dust cloud like the solar nebula to coagulate large bodies" he says. A different kind of dust Generally, science says that our solar system's planets ultimately formed from a huge, ancient cloud of interstellar dust (the solar nebula) in space. The first part of that process would be much like dust bunnies coagulating in an unswept room. Science also holds that the solar nebula was homogenous, that is, the same kind of dust everywhere. But Hypatia's chemistry tugs at this view. "For starters, there are no silicate minerals in Hypatia's matrix, in contrast to chondritic meteorites (and planets like the Earth, Mars and Venus), where silicates are dominant. Then there are the exotic mineral inclusions. If Hypatia itself is not presolar, both features indicate that the solar nebula wasn't the same kind of dust everywhere - which starts tugging at the generally accepted view of the formation of our solar system", says Kramers. Into the future "What we do know is that Hypatia was formed in a cold environment, probably at temperatures below that of liquid nitrogen on Earth (-196 Celsius). In our solar system it would have been way further out than the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where most meteorites come from. Comets come mainly from the Kuiper Belt, beyond the orbit of Neptune and about 40 times as far away from the sun as we are. Some come from the Oort Cloud, even further out. We know very little about the chemical compositions of space objects out there. So our next question will dig further into where Hypatia came from," says Kramers. The little pebble from the Libyan Desert Glass strewn field in south-west Egypt presents a tantalizing piece for an extraterrestrial puzzle that is getting ever more complex. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reefa Posted January 17, 2018 Share Posted January 17, 2018 Great post sort of stuff i love .... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rasbridge Posted March 18, 2018 Share Posted March 18, 2018 Quote Very cool!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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