Scientists have discovered previously unknown types of crystals that " She remained after the fall of the Chelyabinsk meteorite, which occurred nine years ago, Science Alert reports..

An asteroid with a diameter of 18 meters and a weight of 12125 tons entered the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of almost 67 thousand kilometers per hour on February 15, 2013. It exploded in the atmosphere at an altitude of about 23.3 kilometers above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, showering it with fragments..

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In those days, experts called this event a wake-up call about the dangers that asteroids pose to the planet.. The explosion of the Chelyabinsk meteorite was the largest explosion in the Earth's atmosphere after the Tunguska meteorite, which fell on the planet in 1908. A meteorite exploded with 30 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb, according to NASA..

In a new study, scientists analyzed tiny fragments of this space rock left over from its explosion, known as meteorite dust.. Normally, meteors produce a small amount of dust when they burn up, but tiny grains are lost to scientists because they are either too small to find, blown away by the wind, fall into the water, or are polluted by the environment..

But after the explosion of the Chelyabinsk meteorite, a massive plume of dust hung in the air for about four days before it fell to the Earth's surface.. Layers of snow that fell before and after the dust settled caught the samples and stored them for scientists.

Studying dust particles under a microscope, scientists have discovered a new type of crystals. One of these tiny structures ended up right in the center of one of the slides the researchers were looking at.. If not for this, it is likely that scientists would have missed the crystals..

By examining the dust with much more powerful microscopes, scientists have found more of these crystals.. They were in two different shapes.; quasi-spherical or "

X-ray analysis showed that the crystals are composed of layers of graphite that surround a central nanocluster..

The researchers suggest that the most likely candidates for these nanoclusters are buckminsterfullerene (C60), a cage-like ball of carbon atoms, or polyhexacyclooctadecane (C18H12), a molecule composed of carbon and hydrogen..

Scientists believe that the crystals were formed under conditions of high temperature and high pressure caused by the destruction of the meteor, although the exact mechanism is still unclear.. In the future, scientists hope to trace other meteoritic dust samples from other space rocks to find out if these crystals are a common by-product of a meteor breakup or if this is a unique case of the Chelyabinsk meteorite explosion..