In Brief

• Just a few micrometers in diameter, this quasicrystal is the third to be found in this particular meteorite, but it differs from the other two in both structure and chemical composition.
• While many applications have been discovered for synthetic quasicrystals, the rarity of naturally occurring ones has made them difficult to study.

A team led by Luca Bindi, a geologist from the University of Florence, has found an ultra-rare quasicrystal just a few micrometres wide in a meteorite that landed in Russia five years ago. The discovery has been detailed in Scientific Reports.

Two other quasicrystals have already been discovered in this particular meteorite, but the latest is different from its predecessors in both structure and chemical composition. This new quasicrystal is composed of aluminum, copper, and iron atoms structured in an arrangement very similar to the pentagon-based pattern of a soccer ball, a first of its kind in nature.

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