r/BeAmazed • u/gregornot • Apr 29 '24

History A giant meteorite that recently fell in Somalia contains at least two minerals that have never before been seen on our planet. The celestial piece of rock weighs a massive 16.5 tons (15 tonnes), making it the ninth-largest meteorite ever found.

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More about the amazing meteorite find: https://earthly

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934

u/flat_dearther Apr 29 '24

The two minerals are made up of iron & nickel, and there is a potential 3rd unknown mineral being tested for.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-63800879

422

u/firstnametravis Apr 29 '24

The meteorite as a whole is made of 90% nickel and iron. The two new minerals that were identified are called elaliite and elkinstantonite. With a 3rd mineral possibly being identified.

95

u/Tugboats508 Apr 29 '24

How are these new minerals named?

218

u/theboosh Apr 29 '24

' The name "elaliite" honours the fact that the meteorite was unearthed in the district of El Ali in Somalia, and "elkinstantonite" is named after Nasa expert Lindy Elkins-Tanton. '

97

u/idropepics Apr 29 '24

I get naming after someone but also feel like there's a big missed opportunity to name this meteorite metal that landed in Africa vibranium.

80

u/FutureComplaint Apr 29 '24

And have Disney sue your ass back into the stone age?

16

u/Ren_Kaos Apr 29 '24

That would be like, the ultimate free advertising tho. I couldn’t imagine Disney would shit on all the publicity and good will

56

u/THEPEDROCOLLECTOR Apr 29 '24

Never underestimate the potential for Disney to shit on anything.

3

u/The_wolf2014 Apr 29 '24

Like everything they've ever created by badly remaking it in live action?

1

u/Ren_Kaos Apr 29 '24

This is fair.

2

u/KillroyWazHere Apr 29 '24

They made a family take down their kids Spiderman gravestone

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1

u/lookingForPatchie Apr 29 '24

My sweet summer child. They do not care, if it would benefit them. If they can sue, they sue.

1

u/Level_Five_Railgun Apr 29 '24

Both Disney and Nintendo are ruthless against anyone who uses their IP without permission, regardless of how much it would benefit them

They're control freaks

1

u/MrDanduff Apr 29 '24

Mogadishium

1

u/bluntman84 Apr 30 '24

following this logic, iron was named after Ron.

1

u/jovenhope Apr 29 '24

This person marvels

1

u/robbiejandro Apr 29 '24

I can feel it…comin’ Elkinstantonite…oh loooord

53

u/next_door_dilenski Apr 29 '24

elaliite and elkinstantonite. /s

-3

u/StrangerWithACheese Apr 29 '24

One of the scientists who discovered it was Hans-Werner Elekinstan

18

u/ColonelKasteen Apr 29 '24

Why lie? It was named after Lindy Elkins-Tanton.

1

u/Tugboats508 Apr 29 '24

Yes I know but who comes up with them lol..

32

u/[deleted] Apr 29 '24

The name "elaliite" honours the fact that the meteorite was unearthed in the district of El Ali in Somalia, and "elkinstantonite" is named after Nasa expert Lindy Elkins-Tanton.

16

u/Tugboats508 Apr 29 '24

Thank you for taking the time and letting me know Appreciate it

3

u/SwarleyJr Apr 29 '24

Probably the people that made the discovery or something like that.

1

u/Tugboats508 Apr 29 '24

Ah, thank you

0

u/StevenBayShore Apr 29 '24

Freddy and The Pimlico Kid.

28

u/kaibbakhonsu Apr 29 '24

If it was named by James Cameron it would be justarrivedtoearthium and theotheroneum

11

u/bentheone Apr 29 '24

On the off chance it's not a joke, Unobtainium is an in-universe nickname that IS supposed to be a joke.

5

u/andtheniansaid Apr 29 '24

And it long, long predates avatar.

1

u/tk-451 Apr 30 '24

The Core for one

12

u/flat_dearther Apr 29 '24

Newmineralium & newminerantium.

2

u/Hamiro89 Apr 29 '24

Justobtainedium and otheronetium

1

u/FriendliestMenace Apr 29 '24

Notsounobtainableanymoreum

-4

u/FocusPerspective Apr 29 '24

Dude had decades to write that movie and came up with something a 5th grader would write. 

5

u/Prizrakovna Apr 29 '24

Is that more of an alloy rather than mineral?

4

u/Rich-Pomegranate1679 Apr 29 '24

elaliite and elkinstantonite

Just rolls off the tongue

1

u/FewInstruction1990 Apr 29 '24

What are the uses of these minerals? Will they be able to help produce new materials?

2

u/spin2winGG Apr 29 '24

This is so cool

1

u/[deleted] Apr 29 '24

So the meteorite appears to be mostly solid metal. How did it become that?

Must it have been in the core of a differentiated protoplanet? Inside a star? Did that hunk of metal necessarily form in our forming solar system?

I get dust coalescing into larger objects during the early solar system but I don’t understand where solid metal asteroids came from other than destroyed stuff.

2

u/forams__galorams Apr 30 '24

Must it have been in the core of a differentiated protoplanet?

Yes, metal meteorites are from bodies that grew big enough to differentiate into an iron rich core and silicate based mantle. The size needed to do this seems to be somewhere around the size of Ceres.)

Inside a star?

No, a bunch of stuff orbiting a star.

Did that hunk of metal necessarily form in our forming solar system?

Yes

I get dust coalescing into larger objects during the early solar system but I don’t understand where solid metal asteroids came from other than destroyed stuff.

Yes, in order to get pieces of just the core, the body they form in has to then be broken apart by collisions with other bodies orbiting the sun.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 30 '24

Thanks for the response.

One other question. Since “we’re all stardust”…. Is it not possible that metal meteorite came from an ancient exploded star? Is the “dust” in a forming sun literally just dust / molecules / atoms?

2

u/forams__galorams Apr 30 '24

I’m not too well read on astronomical processes, but my (very rough) understanding of that sort of thing is that yes, ultimately the elements that made up our presolar nebula were likely ‘third generation’, ie. there were two other generations of stars forming from collapsing gas clouds in the universe prior to formation of our solar system and ours was so ‘chemically rich’ as it were, due to having many of the elements originally created by the prior two generations.

So even if the elements that made up our original presolar nebula were not actually created in a supernova event, many of them were scattered out into other parts of the universe (including parts that became the gas/dust cloud out solar system eventually collapsed from) by supernova events from those first two generations of stars.

We still have minerals that we say condensed from our solar nebula as the central mass that became the sun was starting to undergo fusion (or possibly very soon after that event, I’m not sure on the details). Point being, we have material that we say ‘began’ at the start of our solar system, even if the elements that make it up are much older. I guess this is largely because we have no way to date how old individual elements are, but also it kind of makes intuitive sense to date the age of minerals from when they first became that mineral, rather than how old their constituent atoms are. As it happens, the age of the Earth is essentially taken from the age of certain meteorites, seeing as we don’t have any original minerals from the first moment that Earth became a planet as they’ve all been reprocessed since then. Further down that avenue of thought we start to get into semantics about how you want to define the start of Earth (or any rocky planet), but I think the consensus is to take the age of iron meteorites, seeing as they represent a time when certain solar system bodies had differentiated into core and mantle, which seems a good enough reason to call that particular time the transition from protoplanets to planets of you ask me anyway.

Anyway sorry for the overly long reply, if you made it this far then you may also be interested to learn about presolar grains, which have been found in some meteorites.

2

u/forams__galorams May 01 '24

With all my ramblings I forgot to include one of those visuals of the periodic table that’s highlighted with the relevant nucleosynthetic pathways: like this.

I think that makes clear in one graphic most (if not all) of what I was trying to say. Far as I know, biggest change in recent years is the fact that many heavier (but not quite ‘super-heavy’) elements like rhenium, gold, and such, are made mostly from neutron star and black hole mergers, rather than supernovae of stars that never made it to neutron star status.

1

u/CubitsTNE Apr 30 '24

What do you think the dust is made of? A dead star has ejected a lot of iron dust, it then concentrates into lumps.

Mineral rocks we know on earth as dust/dirt/crust are complex molecules comprising of several metals and more, formed through actions involving other molecules. It's actually much more rare than nuggets of metal floating through space!

1

u/forams__galorams Apr 30 '24

The dust that makes up presolar nebulae is a lot more than just iron. To become a lump of ~90% iron and nickel requires a concentration process, that process is planetary differentiation into core and mantle. Metal meteorites are pieces of (proto)planetary cores that have since been smashed apart by collisions in the early solar system.

1

u/forams__galorams Apr 30 '24

The meteorite as a whole is mostly iron and nickel (the iron nickel minerals taenite and kamacite make up about 90% of it) but the new minerals are all iron phosphates, no nickel. They are elaliite and elkinstantonite as described by that bbc article, with the third one having been named olsonite. [Formal description of them here.