One of the rarest meteorites on Earth was recently discovered in Italy, the ANSA news agency informs.
Meteorite discovered in Italy PHOTO Nature
It is only the third meteorite known to date to contain an extremely rare alloy of aluminum and copper, and the second to contain a natural quasi-crystal, a material considered “impossible” because, unlike normal crystals, its structure it is ordered but not repeated.
The discovery, described in the magazine Communications Earth & Environment, is the result of an Italian study coordinated by Giovanna Agrosi, professor of mineralogy at the University of Bari, reports the ANSA agency, quoted by Agerpres.
The meteorite, a tiny sphere, was found on Mount Gariglione in Calabria by a collector, who then sent it to the University of Bari, where analysis confirmed its extraterrestrial origin. It is currently kept in the Museum of Earth Sciences at the University of Bari.
Daniela Mele, Gioacchino Tempesta and Floriana Rizzo from the Department of Earth and Geoenvironmental Sciences at the University of Bari, Luca Bindi and Tiziano Catelani from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Florence and Paola Manzari from the Italian Space Agency also contributed to this study.
Luca Bindi had a special merit, as he is the researcher who discovered a quasi-crystal in one of the meteorites kept in the Museum of Natural History of the University of Florence, and his research confirmed that the quasi-crystals, whose discovery was rewarded with the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2011, represents a new type of independent matter.
