Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Hypatia

The story on the hypatia meteorite surprised me. (full paper here)

A meteorite picked up in Egypt (in the Libyan Desert Glass area) contains an unusual amount of carbon, and some odd chemicals (silver iodine phosphide), and metallic aluminum.

I'm trying to imagine just how such a thing would form. If stuff is condensing out of a cold cloud, I can imagine how you could get metallic crystals of aluminum, but if the cloud components are reactive enough to produce iodine compounds, why didn't the iodine react with the aluminum too? The C13 balance suggests that it isn't some kind of terrestrial artifact.

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