A group of scientists are getting very excited about these ultrahard diamonds. After all, they reckon they’ve found evidence of lonsdaleite having formed on a dwarf planet some 4.5 billion years ago, and the resulting study has the potential to be very useful indeed. Scientists have known about lonsdaleite for many years. It was first discovered in 1967 in a meteorite called Canyon Diablo, found in an impact crater in the desert of northern Arizona. Duly named after British crystallographer Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, one of the first two women elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1945, it was soon determined to be a much harder form of diamond. Yet researchers weren’t sure whether it was a defect of a regular diamond formed under intense pressure or if it actually existed in nature.
It was with such a mystery in mind that a group of Australian scientists from Monash University and RMIT University got to work. They began to study 18 diamond-bearing meteorite samples collected mostly from western Africa, with one coming from Australia. In particular, they were looking for signs of carbon atoms arranged in a threedimensional hexagonal structure – the very thing that sets lonsdaleite apart from the cubic atomic structure of
