Meteorite 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" would have existed billions of years ago before breaking up in a collision and was 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 planet of this size.Using three different types of microscopy, the researchers characterised the mineral and chemical make-up of the diamond-bearing rocks left scattered in the Nubian desert of northern Sudan after the asteroid 2008 TC3 hit the atmosphere.Some of the material trapped in the diamond since formation (features known as inclusions) ...