Scientists Discover Something Previously Thought Impossible: Quasicrystals Found in a Nebraska Sand Dune.
According to Science Alert, quasicrystals were discovered inside a fulgurite, also known as “fossilized lightning”, created by extremely high currents melting sand.
This phenomenon is a result of “electricity from the sky”, a lightning strike that inadvertently hit the Earth and, in a mysterious way, transformed the material into an unprecedented arrangement that science had believed could not exist for decades.
This discovery indicates that there are ways for quasicrystals to form that were previously unknown, opening new avenues and hopes for their synthesis.
Cross-section of fulgurite with strange molten material at the core – (Photo: PNAS).
“The discovery of a quasicrystal in a fulgurite with 12-fold symmetry, rarely observed, and a composition never reported before suggests that this method could also hold promise in the laboratory,” stated geologist Luca Bindi from the University of Florence (Italy), the lead author of the study.
The article published in the scientific journal PNAS explains that most naturally occurring crystalline solids, from table salt to diamonds, follow a pattern: their atoms are arranged in a repeating lattice structure in three-dimensional space.
Additionally, there are types of amorphous solids like glass, which is an atomic jumble pieced together without any specific rules.
Quasicrystals represent a hypothetical state lying between the two aforementioned forms of solid matter – possessing both ordered and disordered characteristics – an idea that emerged in 1980, but only recently was something similar found as a result of an atomic bomb explosion in 1945. However, that was not a natural occurrence.
Thus, the discovery of quasicrystals in the Nebraska sand dune is the first evidence that they can exist in nature, produced by the accidental arrangements of the world under conditions of extreme temperature and pressure.
