Black Diamonds From Space?
posted in Amazing Facts, Outer Space |
Black diamonds that are seen only in few places on Earth may have crashed down from space in a kilometre-sized rock, according to new research.These diamonds are also called as carbonado, and are only found in Brazil and the Central African Republic. Unlike the other diamonds, they are made of millions of diamond crystals that get stuck together.
They are also porous, which is still a puzzle. Scientists say it would have been difficult for gas to get trapped in rocks at depths of around 200 kilometres below the Earth’s surface. This extreme pressure under the earth turns carbon into normal diamonds.
“This is the feature that first led some of us to think, well, perhaps there has to be a different alternative,” says Stephen Haggerty, a geologist at Florida International University in Miami, US, and an author of the new study.
Because usually this kind of diamonds are rare and can never be found in traditional diamond fields, some scientists suspect that they crash to Earth from space.Researchers claim that this might have came from a large, diamond-bearing asteroid that may have fallen to Earth many billions of years ago, when the planet and the Moon were being heavily hit by space rocks.
This Carbonado has been dated to be between 2.6 billion and 3.8 billion years old. The researchers believe that the diamond is ancient, they also found hydrogen in the carbonado that indicates that the diamonds came from a hydrogen-rich interstellar space. The diamond dust from which they formed were released when a star exploded in the supernova many billions of years ago.
The diamond dust then became part of the cloud of gas and dust from which our solar system condensed. Over time, it coalesced into larger clumps that became embedded in asteroids “like plums in pudding”, Haggerty says.