Hypatia is a small stone found in

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediter ...

1996, which may be the first known specimen of a

comet nucleus The nucleus is the solid, central part of a comet, once termed a ''dirty snowball'' or an ''icy dirtball''. A cometary nucleus is composed of Rock (geology), rock, dust, and frozen gases. When heated by the Sun, the gases Sublimation (physics), ...

on Earth, although defying physically-accepted models for hypervelocity processing of organic material.

Discovery and name

Hypatia was discovered in December 1996 by Aly A. Barakat at , directly in proximity to a dark,

slag Slag is a by-product of smelting (pyrometallurgical) ores and used metals. Broadly, it can be classified as ferrous (by-products of processing iron and steel), ferroalloy (by-product of ferroalloy production) or non-ferrous/base metals (by-prod ...

-like glassy material that was interpreted to be a form of

Libyan desert glass Libyan Desert glass or Great Sand Sea glass is an impactite, made mostly of lechatelierite, found in areas in the eastern Sahara, in the deserts of eastern Libya and western Egypt. Fragments of desert glass can be found over areas of tens of s ...

. The rock was named after Hypatia of Alexandria ( 350–370 AD – 415 AD) – the philosopher, astronomer,

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

, and inventor. Although its status as an extraterrestrial rock is widely accepted, Hypatia is not officially classified as a true meteorite specimen by the

Meteoritical Society The Meteoritical Society is a non-profit scholarly organization founded in 1933 to promote research and education in planetary science with emphasis on studies of meteorites and other extraterrestrial materials that further our understanding of the ...

due to its small size. The original sample was cut apart and sent to multiple labs for study, reducing its original size of approximately 30 grams to about four grams.

Research

Tests done in South Africa by researchers Jan Kramers and Georgy Belyanin of the

University of Johannesburg The University of Johannesburg (UJ) is a public university located in Johannesburg, South Africa. The University of Johannesburg came into existence on 1 January 2005 as the result of a merger between the Rand Afrikaans University (RAU), the ...

show that Hypatia contains microscopic

diamond Diamond is a Allotropes of carbon, solid form of the element carbon with its atoms arranged in a crystal structure called diamond cubic. Another solid form of carbon known as graphite is the Chemical stability, chemically stable form of car ...

s. Due to the presence of several anomalous isotopic distributions unknown in prior association, some believe the Hypatia material is necessarily of extraterrestrial origin, although significant terrestrial contamination is dismissed by proponents as being impact-authigenic from incorporation of terrestrial atmosphere, the physics of which are unresolved. Further speculation from comparative summary statistical associations support that Hypatia is a relict fragment of the hypothetical impacting body assumed to have produced the chemically-dissimilar

. If this association holds, Hypatia may have impacted Earth approximately 28 million years ago. Its unusual chemistry has prompted further speculation that Hypatia may predate the formation of the Solar System. In 2018 Georgy Belyanin of the

and colleagues found compounds including polyaromatic hydrocarbons and silicon carbide associated with a previously-unknown nickel phosphide compound. Other observations supporting non-terrestrial origin for the Hypatia samples include ratios of silicon to carbon anti-correlated to terrestrial averages, or those of major planets like Mars or Venus. Some samples of

interstellar dust Cosmic dust, also called extraterrestrial dust, star dust or space dust, is dust which exists in outer space, or has fallen on Earth. Most cosmic dust particles measure between a few molecules and 0.1 mm (100 micrometers). Larger particles are c ...

overlap Hypatia distributions, although Hypatia's elemental chemistry also overlaps some terrestrial distributions. In 2022, Kramers and Andreoli proposed the hypothesis that the Hypatia stone represents the first evidence on Earth of a

type Ia supernova A Type Ia supernova (read: "type one-A") is a type of supernova that occurs in binary systems (two stars orbiting one another) in which one of the stars is a white dwarf. The other star can be anything from a giant star to an even smaller white ...

explosion.Kramers et al. (2022)
"The chemistry of the extraterrestrial carbonaceous stone "Hypatia": A perspective on dust heterogeneity in interstellar space"
''Icarus''. Retrieved May 25, 2022.

References

External links

{{Meteorites by name Meteorites found in Egypt 1996 in Egypt 1996 in science Individual rocks Comets Meteorites

Discovery and name

Research

See also

References

External links