high pressure experiments tagged posts

1. Cristobalite crystals from Harvard Mineralogical Museum, found at Ellora caves in India. Credit: RRUFF Project / University of Arizona
2. A fresh impact crater on Mars, as imaged by the HiRISE camera on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

X-ray analysis reveals unexpected behaviour of silica minerals. With high-pressure experiments at DESY’s X-ray light source PETRA III and other facilities, a research team around Leonid Dubrovinsky from the University of Bayreuth has solved a long standing riddle in the analysis of meteorites from Moon and Mars. The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, can explain why different versions of silica can coexist in meteorites, although they normally require vastly different conditions to form...