All doubts about Earth’s hottest stone, discovered by a postdoctoral student in 2011, have been dispelled by the University of Western Ontario research team. The new research found four additional grains of zircon, commonly known as a substitute for diamond, and confirmed that the stone in question can reach 2,370 degrees, corroborating the findings of previous research. The research, published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters
, is based on Earth sciences postdoctoral fellow Gavin Tolometti and co-authors Timmons Erickson of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Gordon Osinski and Catherine Neish of the Earth sciences division, and Cayron Cyril of the Thermomechanical Metallurgical Laboratory. carried out by
Michael Zanetti, then a doctoral student, while working with Osinski in the Lake Mistanstin impact crater in Labrador in 2011, found a glass rock with frozen zircon grains in it. This rock was later analyzed; It was found to occur at 2,370 degrees as a result of an asteroid impact, and these findings were shared in an article published in 2017.
Tolometti and his colleagues confirmed the accuracy of the 2011 finding by finding an additional four zircon grains in their research conducted with samples collected between 2009 and 2011. In addition, the researchers found that molten rock, consisting of rock and soil that melted into liquid after the meteor strike, at a different location within the same impact structure, superheated differently in more than one location and reached much higher temperatures than previously thought.
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