A type of crystal that breaks the rules of ordinary crystallography has been found in a tube of melted sand from Nebraska.
A tube of"fossilized lightning" from Nebraska's Sandhills holds a rare type of quasicrystal that had previously only been found in meteorites and at atomic bomb test sites.
Quasicrystals break those rules. They're put together in an ordered pattern, but that pattern does repeat. They also have rotational symmetries that no ordinary crystal can achieve. A quasicrystal with icosahedral symmetry, for example, can display five-fold symmetry around six different lines of rotation. Quasicrystals were first discovered in the laboratory.
Dramatic discharge Fulgurites form when lightning hits sand, fusing together the grains in a gnarly, branching tube of glass. Bindi collected multiple fulgurites in his search for quasicrystals. The one that held this rare form of matter came from the Sandhills of Nebraska, near the village of Hyannis. This area of Nebraska is made up of grass-covered sand dunes.
Either way, the resulting branched glass contained a mixture of materials from the sand and the metals in the electrical line, including manganese, silicon, chromium, aluminum and nickel. To meld these materials, the temperature of the sand must have briefly reached at least 3,110 degrees Fahrenheit , the researchers reported Dec. 27 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .
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