Facts

Fact: Like a Diamond in the Sky

Glittering stars in the night sky aside, scientists have long known that some diamonds hail from the heavens. In 1981, for example, when Smithsonian researchers tried to cut through a large iron meteorite that had crash-landed in the Allen Hills of Antarctica, the sawteeth on their blade got all chewed up. Subsequent X-rays showed that the stone was riddled with microscopic diamonds, the hardest substance known. The scientists theorized that the meteorite’s diamonds were born during a cataclysmic collision out in the asteroid belt.

Other meteoric diamonds apparently hail from deep space. In 1987, a team of researchers headed by Edward Anders and Roy Lewis of the University of Chicago reported the discovery of meteorite-embedded diamonds so miniscule that trillions could fit on the head of a pin. Unlike the Smithsonian diamonds, these microscopic crystals contain an isotopic mixture of xenon gas not found on Earth. “It seems necessary to invoke an extra-solar origin for the diamond,” the scientists concluded in a paper published in Nature, indicating a birth outside our solar system.

Diamonds in the Sky