Space diamonds 'came from lost planet':
A diamond-bearing space rock that exploded in Earth's atmosphere in 2008 was part of a lost planet from the early Solar System, a study suggests.
The parent "proto-planet" existed billions of years ago before breaking up in a collision and would have been about as large as Mercury or Mars.
A team has published their results in the journal Nature Communications.
They argue that the pressures necessary to produce diamonds of this kind could only occur in [a] planet of this size.
A large planetary body inferred from diamond inclusions in a ureilite meteorite (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-03808-6) (DX)
Planetary formation models show that terrestrial planets are formed by the accretion of tens of Moon- to Mars-sized planetary embryos through energetic giant impacts. However, relics of these large proto-planets are yet to be found. Ureilites are one of the main families of achondritic meteorites and their parent body is believed to have been catastrophically disrupted by an impact during the first 10 million years of the solar system. Here we studied a section of the Almahata Sitta ureilite using transmission electron microscopy, where large diamonds were formed at high pressure inside the parent body. We discovered chromite, phosphate, and (Fe,Ni)-sulfide inclusions embedded in diamond. The composition and morphology of the inclusions can only be explained if the formation pressure was higher than 20 GPa. Such pressures suggest that the ureilite parent body was a Mercury- to Mars-sized planetary embryo.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @06:50PM (3 children)
http://thiaoouba.com/phaeton.html [thiaoouba.com]
There are other variants on the idea:
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sumer_anunnaki/esp_sumer_annunaki23.htm [bibliotecapleyades.net]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday April 18 2018, @07:02PM (2 children)
Yes, there is pseudoscience out there.
Protoplanets are nothing special.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @08:56PM (1 child)
This is like saying a fertilized egg is nothing special, except worse. Any one of those protoplanets could have harbored literally quadrillions of lifeforms.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday April 18 2018, @11:06PM
Could have, but probably didn't. The early solar system was a dangerous place.
Unless you're going to argue from the viewpoint of Electric Universe [rationalwiki.org]or whatever which would just be funny.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Megahard on Wednesday April 18 2018, @07:22PM (1 child)
Named "Lucy"?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday April 18 2018, @07:31PM
No, "Megarockhard".
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:07AM (1 child)
For some reason I'm thinking that a violent impact could also create the diamonds, without necessarily needing planet sized bodies. Around impact craters or something.
But I can't remember why that would be true/false
(Score: 1) by SomeGuyOnTheInterwebs on Friday April 20 2018, @06:07PM
TFA discusses this. The diamonds studied have chemical inclusions in them. That, plus their structure, eliminates the possibility they were created via shock, and indicates that the inclusions were incorporated via extreme pressure, such as that provided by growing the crystals within a planetary body over long time.
-- Just SomeGuyOnTheInterwebs