Kuratite: New Mineral Discovered in Meteorite

he stony meteorite D’Orbigny is the source of a newly discovered mineral,kuratite. Its name honors Dr Gero Kurat (1938-2009), a world-renowned meteorite researcher and long-term head of the Mineralogical-Petrographical Department at the Natural History Museum in Vienna, Austria.

This image shows a fragment of the D’Orbigny meteorite. Image credit: Jon Taylor / CC BY-SA 2.0.

The meteorite D’Orbigny, a 16.55-kg stone mostly covered with dark gray fusion crust, was found by a farmer plowing a corn field in July 1979 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The object was originally thought to be an Indian artifact and it remained on the farm for nearly two decades before speculation arose that it might in fact be a meteorite.

Confirmation of it’s extraterrestrial status was finally achieved in 2000 after a sample was analyzed by Dr Kurat and his colleagues.

The meteorite was determined to be an exceedingly rare achondrite known as an angrite. It is characterized by prominent vesicles which are rarely seen in meteorites.

In 2004, Dr Kurat with co-authors published a paper in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, in which they also reported on the occurrence of an unidentified iron-aluminum-titanium-silicate in the meteorite D’Orbigny.

This is a fasle-color micrograph showing kuratite (Ku) crystals embedded in the D’Orbigny meteorite. Image credit: Hwang SL et al.

This unknown mineral phase consisted of very tiny crystals with an average diameter of only about 0.01 mm.

Because of the small size of the available material it was very difficult to determine all relevant chemical-physical properties, which are required for a mineral phase to be accepted as a new mineral.

In a new study, reported at the 45th Lunar and Planetary Conference in Houston, Texas, scientists led by Dr Shyh-Lung Hwang of the National Dong Hwa University in Hualien, Taiwan, were able to identify the unknown mineral as kuratite.

______

Hwang SL et al. Kuratite (IMA 2013-109): The ‘Unknown’ Fe-Al-Ti Silicate from the Angrite D’Orbigny. 45th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. LPI Contribution no. 1777, p.1818

Comments

This strange mineral grows on dead bodies and turns them blue

If you were to get up close and personal with Ötzi the Iceman – the 5,000-year-old mummy of a tattooed , deep-voiced man who died and was frozen in the Alps – you’d notice that his skin is flecked with tiny bits of blue. At first, it would appear that these oddly bluish crystal formations embedded in his skin are from freezing to death or some other sort of trauma, but it’s actually a mineral called vivianite (or blue ironstone) and it happens to form quite often on corpses left in iron-rich environments. For Ötzi, the patches of vivianite are from him resting near rocks with flecks of iron in them, but other cases are way more severe. According to Chris Drudge at Atlas Obscura , a man named John White was buried in a cast iron coffin back in 1861. During those days, coffins often had a window for grieving family members to peer inside even if the lid was closed during the funeral. Sometime after he was buried, that window broke, allow...

It's Official: Time Crystals Are a New State of Matter, and Now We Can Create Them

Peer-review has spoken. Earlier this year , physicists had put together a blueprint for how to make and measure time crystals - a bizarre state of matter with an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, allowing them to maintain constant oscillation without energy. Two separate research teams managed to create what looked an awful lot like time crystals back in January, and now both experiments have successfully passed peer-review for the first time, putting the 'impossible' phenomenon squarely in the realm of reality. "We've taken these theoretical ideas that we've been poking around for the last couple of years and actually built it in the laboratory," says one of the researchers , Andrew Potter from Texas University at Austin. "Hopefully, this is just the first example of these, with many more to come." Time crystals are one of the coolest things physics has dished up in recent months, because they point to a...

The Dark Side Of The Love Hormone Oxytocin

New research shows oxytocin isn't the anti-anxiety drug we thought it was. Oxytocin, the feel-good bonding hormone released by physical contact with another person, orgasm and childbirth (potentially encouraging monogamy ), might have a darker side. The love drug also plays an important role in intensifying negative emotional memories and increasing feelings of fear in future stressful situations, according to a new study. Two experiments performed with mice found that the hormone activates a signaling molecule called extracellular-signal-related kinases (ERK), which has been associated with the way the brain forms memories of fear . According to Jelena Radulovic, senior author on the study and a professor at Northwestern University's medical school, ERK stimulates fear pathways in the brain's lateral septum, the region with the highest levels of oxytocin. Mice without oxytocin receptors and mice with even more oxytocin receptors tha...

Aestus Ajith

Search This Blog