Exotic quasicrystal discovered in meteorite
From PBS
Once upon a time, scientists thought that quasicrystals — exotic materials with an orderly pattern that never exactly repeats itself — could not possibly exist. Then they made some in a lab in Nobel-winning research. Next, scientists thought that quasicrystals could not exist in nature. Then they found quasicrystals with the same properties as the lab-created ones in nature — specifically, in tiny fragments of a meteorite.Read the rest here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/brand-new-quasicrystal-discovered-meteorite/Now, researchers have found an entirely new, extreme type of quasicrystal with an isosahedral — 20-sided — symmetry. By contrast, most regular crystals in nature have an atomic structure with three or four sides. Paul Steinhart, one of the physicists behind the discovery, described why this 20-sided symmetry seems almost impossible.
If you were tiling the floor of a room, Steinhart said, you would need tiles of one of a few shapes: triangles, squares or hexagons. Anything else would leave gaps. However, if you changed the shape of the wall to curve in the right way, you could fit different shapes — akin to the the way a soccer ball has pentagonal patches that stitch together. So much like how pentagonal tiles would not work on a flat floor, a 20-sided atom can only fit together into quasicrystals.
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