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| New Scientist |
A Nobel prizewinning crystal has just got alien status. It now seems that the only known sample of a naturally occurring quasicrystal fell from space, changing our understanding of the conditions needed for these curious structures to form.
Quasicrystals are orderly, like conventional crystals, but have a more complex form of symmetry. Patterns echoing this symmetry have been used in art for centuries but materials with this kind of order on the atomic scale were not discovered until the 1980s.
Their discovery, in a lab-made material composed of metallic elements including aluminium and manganese, garnered Daniel Shechtman of the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa last year's Nobel prize in chemistry.
Now Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University and colleagues have evidence that the only known naturally occurring quasicrystal sample, found in a rock from the Koryak mountains in eastern Russia, is part of a meteorite.
Quasicrystals are orderly, like conventional crystals, but have a more complex form of symmetry. Patterns echoing this symmetry have been used in art for centuries but materials with this kind of order on the atomic scale were not discovered until the 1980s.
Their discovery, in a lab-made material composed of metallic elements including aluminium and manganese, garnered Daniel Shechtman of the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa last year's Nobel prize in chemistry.
Now Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University and colleagues have evidence that the only known naturally occurring quasicrystal sample, found in a rock from the Koryak mountains in eastern Russia, is part of a meteorite.
New Scientist: Nobel prizewinning quasicrystal fell from space
Hay i love reading such posts. 2 days back i read an article stating there will be aliens coming to earth by 2014..lets wait and watch, have been watching them in movies. hope they make friendship rather then a war!!! Sample CV
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