This meteorite’s diamonds hint that it was born in a lost planet
The space rock could come from a Mars-sized protoplanet in the early solar system
HERE TODAY Violent collisions in the early solar system, illustrated here, probably broke apart would-be planets — but diamonds forged in those planets’ cores may have made it to Earth as meteorites.
A chunk of space rock may have been forged inside a long-lost planet from the early solar system. Tiny pockets of iron and sulfur embedded in diamonds inside the meteorite probably formed under high pressures found only inside planets the size of Mercury or Mars, researchers suggest April 17 in Nature Communications.
The parent planet no longer exists, though — it was smashed to smithereens in the solar system’s violent infancy.
“We probably have in our hands a piece of one of these first planets that have disappeared,” says Philippe Gillet of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, or EPFL, in Switzerland.