Diamonds found in a meteorite suggest it came from another planet

Recent studies have revealed that a meteorite filled with diamonds may be a fragment of a “lost planet”.

In 2008, a space rock bearing diamonds entered our atmosphere and crushed the earth surface somewhere in Sudan deserts. Some parts of it were recovered and after numerous studies, scientists have concluded that these space rocks may actually be fragments of another planet that orbited our Sun and that was destroyed billions of years ago. If this theory is confirmed, scientists claim it would be the first time in history they have recovered small fragments from one of the so-called “lost” planets that populated this solar system many years ago.

“We have in our hands a piece of a former planet that was spinning around the sun before the end of the formation of today’s solar system,” were the words that one of the world’s renowned planetary scientists, Philippe Gillet, said at a conference at the Federal Institute of Technology, located in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The discovery, however, was made by Farhang Nabiei, who is a colleague of Dr. Gillet. Dr. Nabiei took a closer look at some HR images of a meteorite that had reached the earth surface about ten years ago in the Nubian Desert located in Sudan. This space rock is included in the ureilite category, which accounts for less than 1% of the total amount of objects that collide with our planet and which is associated with a certain type of rare meteorites that also contain various types of minerals. For instance, this one in particular contained diamonds. During this research, not one, but three varied types of microscopy were used.

The “proto-planet” that scientists refer to as the “parent” of this meteorite, is supposed to have existed about 10 billions of years ago and was similar in size to Mars or Mercury. At some point, this planet broke up in a collision and fragments of it spread throughout the solar system.