China has discovered a crystal from the Moon made of a previously unknown mineral, while also confirming that the lunar surface contains a key ingredient for nuclear fusion, a potential form of effectively limitless power that harnesses the same forces that fuel the Sun and other stars.

The crystal is part of a batch of lunar samples collected by China’s Chang’e-5 mission, which landed on the Moon in 2020, loaded up with about four pounds of rocks, and delivered them to Earth days later. After carefully sifting through the samples—which are the first Moon rocks returned to Earth since 1976—scientists at the Beijing Research Institute of Uranium Geology spotted a single crystal particle, with a diameter smaller than the width of a human hair.

The crystal is made of the novel mineral Changesite—(Y), named after the Chinese Moon goddess, Chang’e, that also inspired China’s series of lunar missions. It was confirmed as a new mineral on Friday by the Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification (CNMNC) of the International Mineralogical Association (IMA), according to the Chinese state-run publication Global Times.

Changesite—(Y) is the sixth new mineral to be identified in Moon samples, and the first to be discovered by China. Before China, only the U.S. and Russia could claim to have discovered a new Moon mineral. It is a transparent crystal that formed in a region of the northern lunar near-face that was volcanically active about 1.2 billion years ago.

According to state media, the new lunar samples also contain helium-3, a version of the element helium that has long fascinated scientists—and science fiction creators—because of its potential as a nuclear fusion fuel source. This hypothetical form of power aims to harness energy released by atoms that merge under tremendous pressures, such as those in the interiors of stars. Starlight is a ubiquitous product of nuclear fusion, but human-made fusion reactors will still likely take decades to develop, assuming they are feasible at all.

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That said, if these reactors do become a reality, helium-3 would be a good fuel candidate because it produces less radioactive byproducts and nuclear waste compared to other atoms. Whereas helium-3 is incredibly scarce on Earth, it is abundant on the Moon, a disparity that has stoked dreams of mining the material on the lunar surface.

Along those lines, China has joined the United States, and other nations, in expressing interest in extracting resources from the Moon in the future.

For more than a decade, scientists have spotted weird radio signals in space that flash for a fraction of a second with an intense brightness that hints at mysterious and energetic sources. Dozens of these fast radio bursts, or FRBs, have been discovered—including one-off bursts and FRBs that emit multiple flashes, sometimes in clockwork patterns—yet their origins remain unknown.  

Now, scientists led by Fayin Wang, an astronomer at Nanjing University in China, think they may have identified the likely source of one of the most enigmatic of all FRBs, which is known as FRB 20201124A. Since it was discovered in November 2020, this repeating burst has been seen going through super-charged periods of activity marked by many high-energy flashes, which have helped scientists trace its location to a galaxy some 1.3 billion miles from Earth.

Wang and his colleagues examined new images of the FRB obtained by China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), which is the largest single-dish radio telescope on Earth. The observations revealed patterns that are similar to a system in our own galaxy that contains two extreme objects: a magnetar, which is a highly magnetic type of dense dead star, and a Be star, which is an extremely hot and rapidly spinning type of star. 

The researchers concluded that the same type of system “can naturally explain the mysterious features of FRB 20201124A,” according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature Communications. 

“We propose that FRB 20201124A is produced by a magnetar residing in a binary system with a Be star companion with a disk,” Wang said in an email to Motherboard. “The interaction between radio bursts and the disk of Be star can naturally explain the observed unusual characteristics of FRB 20201124A.”

FRB 20201124A has been a head-scratcher to astronomers because its light is imprinted with features that are not seen in other FRBs. For instance, it is the first FRB to display variations in a measurement called Faraday rotation. This rotation describes the twists in the direction of polarization at different radio frequencies, which creates a pattern in the observations that can reveal insights about the environment around an FRB. While Faraday rotation has been spotted in other bursts, Wang noted that the measurement varies over time in FRB 20201124A.

“It is the first FRB showing Faraday rotation measure (RM) variations,” he said. “It has a short-time variation of the RM during the first 36 days of FAST observations, followed by a constant RM during the later 18 days.”

This shifting rotation measure implies that the magnetic field of the FRB source reverses along our line of sight, creating the distinctive pattern. This particular feature, among others, “can put strict constraints on the local environment of FRB 20201124A,” Wang noted.

With that in mind, the new study proposes that the FRB’s periods of rapid flashes are produced by energetic interactions between the magnetar and the disk of the Be star during “periastron,” which is the point when these two objects are closest together in their orbit. During this close approach, radio waves emitted by the roiling magnetar ripple through the disk of the Be star, producing the strange signatures seen in the FRB. 

These new insights stem from FAST’s exceptional observations of FRB 20201124A, which are described in a companion study published at the same time in Nature. The telescope detected a whopping 1,863 independent bursts from April 1 to June 11, 2021, which “provide evidence for a complicated, dynamically evolving, magnetized immediate environment” around this FRB, according to the other study.

Wang and his colleagues hope that future observations might reveal even more details about this system, including the time it takes for the objects to orbit each other. The researchers also plan to apply their findings to another similar repeating burst called FRB 20190520B.

“Our model predicts the RM evolution would be quasi-periodic,” Wang said. “If a large number of RM detections spanning a long timescale are accumulated, the orbital period could be derived from these RM data. So we plan to observe FRB 20201124A and FRB 20190520B for a long time.”

While the new research offers a compelling explanation for the source of FRB 20201124A, FRBs are not a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. Because these signals can be so different, scientists think they are likely caused by a variety of strange astrophysical objects, all of which must be extremely powerful in order to be seen across millions, and even billions, of light years.  

With that in mind, it will take many more years to identify the sources of all FRBs, and some may remain unexplained forever. Still, scientists plan to learn as much as possible about these strange signals from space, both to sate their curiosity and also because FRBs can help shed light on longstanding cosmic mysteries, such as the rate at which the universe is expanding and the reason it appears to be missing some forms of matter.

“FRBs are important cosmological probes,” Wang concluded.  

Billions of years ago, at the dawn of our solar system, an asteroid smashed into a dwarf planet in a cataclysmic collision that blasted the insides of the planet into outer space. Over time, remnants of the dwarf planet’s mantle have fortuitously fallen to Earth as diamond-rich meteorites, called ureilites, that reveal an unprecedented glimpse into the subterranean layers of a doomed ancient world.

For years, scientists have puzzled over the fallen remains of the long-lost planet and the mysterious presence of its abundant diamonds, which include hints of lonsdaleite, an ultra-rare type of diamond named after the pioneering crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale. 

Now, scientists led by Andrew Tomkins, a professor of geosciences at Monash University, have found the largest lonsdaleite diamonds ever seen in ureilites, unambiguously confirming their existence in the meteorites. The team proposed “a unique model for ureilites that can reconcile all conflicting observations relating to diamond formation,” and which may ultimately inspire novel industrial applications, according to a study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We had known about diamonds on ureilites for some time,” Tomkins told Motherboard in an email, citing a recent study that probed the origins of these materials. “While I was doing that work, I was looking down my microscope at the diamonds in various samples and noticed that one of them contained some unusual folded diamonds. For a geologist that was completely weird—diamond is the hardest material known, so it shouldn't be possible to bend it.” 

“That got me interested in following down that line of research,” he continued, prompting the involvement of his co-authors at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. “We went from there to produce the story we have. Those folded diamonds turned out to be an unusual hexagonal form of diamond known as lonsdaleite.”

While previous studies have found evidence of lonsdaleite in ureilites, Tomkins and his colleagues used advanced electron microscopy to detect lonsdaleite crystals that are up to a micron in size, which is about 70 times smaller than the width of a human hair. While this may seem tiny, these lonsdaleite chunks are bigger than anything seen previously in the space rocks. 

This level of detail helped the researchers come up with what the study calls “the only known solution” to the problem of how lonsdaleite and diamonds were forged after the ancient impact, without the presence catalyzing metals, according to the study. The team suggested that lonsdaleite sprung from hot fluid flowing in the wake of the collision, which eerily preserved the properties of the pre-existing graphite in the mantle. 

Some of the lonsdaleite was replaced by conventional cubic diamonds as the rocks cooled, creating the distinct patterns seen in ureilites, according to the new model. The process, called chemical vapor deposition (CVD), is like a natural version of a manufacturing technique used to produce synthetic diamonds under laboratory conditions.   

“I had thought early on that the diamonds might have possibly formed via CVD, but when we found the lonsdaleite, and then found a progression from lonsdaleite-to-diamond formation, there had to be an explanation that fitted in with the known evolution of the ureilite parent asteroid,” Tomkins said. “This is the fit that made the best sense with the observations we had.”

“It adds to the story of the complex chemistry that happened in the aftermath of the catastrophic disruption event,” he noted. “Scientists have known about this event for a long time, but nobody had realized that this is when the diamonds and lonsdaleite probably formed.”

In addition to shedding new light on these naturally forming space diamonds, the results may inspire creative approaches to making synthetic lonsdaleite and diamonds. Given that lonsdaleite is even harder than normal diamond, it has many potential applications in materials science, including cogs in miniature machines. This is far from the first time that diamonds forged in space have served as models for industrial manufacturing; scientists recently transformed plastic into diamonds by recreating the conditions inside Uranus and Neptune.

“What we've basically found is a situation where some graphite shapes—the fold shapes—were replaced with lonsdaleite that almost perfectly preserved that same shape,” Tomkins said. “So the thought is that in the lab it might be possible to replicate that natural process. It should be possible to fabricate components from very soft graphite and then turn those shapes into lonsdaleite. It's really up to engineers to find uses for such a technique—there must be many possible uses.”

“The next plan is to start conducting experiments that try to replicate the natural process that formed the lonsdaleite,” he concluded. “Who knows, maybe we'll be the first to figure out how to make these ultrahard micro-machine components.”

Our solar system is relatively tranquil at this point in time, with planets that follow predictable orbits around the Sun, but these cosmic surroundings weren’t always so calm.

Scientists have long suspected that during the infancy of our solar system, tumultuous instabilities dramatically shifted the orbits of the gas giants—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—and may have even straight-up kicked a fifth mysterious planet out into the interstellar wilderness. However, the exact trigger and timing of this type of instability, which has also appears to have occurred in other star systems, has remained a matter of debate

Now, scientists led by Beibei Liu, a physicist at Zhejiang University in China, have proposed a new mechanism that can explain how these giants ended up in their distant orbits, and can even account for some of the puzzling features of the solar system’s innermost rocky worlds, such as Earth and Mars. 

A previous hypothesis, known as the Nice model after the French city where it originated, proposed that the orbital instabilities arose after the evaporation of the cloudy primordial disk that birthed our solar system. Now, Liu and his colleagues present results from 14,000 simulations that suggest this evaporating cloud was, itself, the driver of the turbulent effects that led to the familiar planetary configuration we live in today, according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature. 

Study co-authors Seth Jacobson, a planetary scientist at Michigan State University, and Sean Raymond, an astronomer at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux in France, first started developing this new explanation a few years ago.

“While the evidence for a giant planet instability in the solar system is clear, both Sean and I knew that there was mounting evidence that the instability must have taken place much earlier than originally hypothesized in the 2005 Nice model,” Jacobson said in an email. 

Jacobson pointed to two main paradigm shifts about the early solar system that laid the groundwork for the new study. First, evidence suggests that a glut of ancient impact craters on the Moon may have been caused by a longer period of bombardment, rather than a short-lived pulse of collisions, as previously believed. Second, the Nice model suggests the instability occurred after the formation of rocky planets like Mars and Earth, but new research implies that these inner worlds would have been much more disrupted by this event if that were the real timeline.

“These two realizations over the last 15-ish years provoked us to question whether a different giant instability triggered earlier in solar system history could explain many of the same phenomena as the original Nice model,” Jacobson explained. “Sean and I were then thinking about what could be an alternative trigger and Sean identified Beibei Liu's work on planet-disk interactions near the magnetospheric cavity as potentially worth examining more closely as an analog to what might have happened during disk photoevaporation.”

This evaporation was sparked some 4.6 billion years ago when the Sun began to shine for the first time, prompting its heat and energy to push the cloud of gas and dust further out into the solar system. This process occurred within ten million years of the solar system’s birth, when its rocky worlds were still cooking, and its outer gas giants were emerging in neat compact orbits within the same plane of the gassy disk, much closer to the Sun than they are today. 

But as the cloud of dust moved outward, its inner edge caught the gas giants in its tide, causing their orbits to go awry and get more spread out. Liu’s team modeled this process, which they call the “rebound effect” using differing numbers of gas giants, including an early solar system that had five giant worlds, instead of four. The simulations predicted that this extra planet was gravitationally ejected from our system by instabilities caused by the dispersal of the primordial gas disk. 

Some scientists have already proposed that the solar system contains a hidden planet in its outer reaches, a hypothetical ice giant known as Planet Nine. Jacobson noted that he has “always been partial to the Planet Nine hypothesis” because of these early instability models, and added that “passing nearby stars could perturb that ice giant onto a distant orbit, like that hypothesized for Planet Nine.”

In addition to reconstructing the position of the giant planets, the results may also explain how Mars ended up so much smaller than Earth. As the disk evaporated through the embryonic inner planets, it may have disrupted the red planet as it formed, leading to its reduced mass. 

Moreover, the new study has implications well beyond our solar system, as the team notes that almost all the star systems that are observed beyond Earth are similarly shaped by orbital instabilities. Jacobson pointed out that only about five percent of star systems are arranged in the kind of resonant compact structure predicted by models, revealing a gap between our expectations and real observations of outer space.

“Other works, most importantly those of Andre Izidoro [an astronomer at Rice University], have then shown that dynamical instabilities must have occurred in these systems to explain how they go from where theory predicts they should be to where they are observed,” Jacobson said. “It could be that in each system the dynamical instability was triggered by a different mechanism, but the rebound effect that we discovered in this paper is nearly universal and reasonably could have caused instability in the ~95% of planetary systems that we see it in.”

In this way, unlocking the enigmatic origins of our local solar neighborhood could help us understand distant alien worlds across our galaxy, the Milky Way.

Update: This article has been updated with comments from co-author Seth Jacobson.