Lightning that struck a sand dune in Nebraska led to the formation of crystals that are rarely found in nature. Inside a piece of fulgurite - or "

The discovery means that there are previously unknown ways to form quasicrystals. And this opens up new ways to create them in the laboratory..

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Most of the crystals found in nature, from table salt to the hardest diamonds, follow the same pattern: their atoms are arranged in a lattice structure that repeats itself in three-dimensional space.. Solids lacking these repeating atomic structures are usually an atomic mess..

Quasicrystals violate this rule: their atoms are arranged in a certain pattern, but it does not repeat..

The idea of \u200b\u200bthe existence of quasicrystals arose in the 1980s, but then it was considered impossible.. Solids can either have a crystalline structure, or they can be something amorphous, but not something in between.. But after scientists really managed to find quasicrystals: both by creating them in the laboratory and by finding them in meteorites.

Later, the researchers also determined that quasi-crystals in nature can only appear under extreme conditions, at incredibly high temperatures and pressures.. For a long time, quasicrystals were found in nature only in craters left after the fall of high-speed meteorites..

But recently, scientists have found a quasi-crystal that formed during nuclear bomb tests in 1945.. Although not a "

Lightning is one of the most powerful forces in nature, it strikes at great speed and can heat the air it passes through to five times the temperature of the sun.. When lightning strikes in a certain place with great force, it can melt sand, leaving fulgurite, a fossilized footprint..

That is, all the "

“Inside a piece of rock subjected to a lightning discharge, a “dodecagonal quasi-crystal” was discovered, consisting of atomic layers equidistant from each other, each of which has 12-fold symmetry and a quasi-crystalline order that is impossible for ordinary crystals.. The discovery suggests mechanisms for the formation of quasicrystals in nature (on Earth and in space) and in the laboratory,” the scientists said..