Scientists have discovered that an ancient "catastrophic collision" between a dwarf planet and an asteroid is responsible for the creation of a rare and mysterious cosmic gem. The findings, published ...

Researchers made small, pure samples of the elusive mineral lonsdaleite – also known as hexagonal diamond — and tested its ...

ANU Associate Professor Jodie Bradby said her team – including ANU PhD student Thomas Shiell and experts from RMIT, the University of Sydney and the United States – made nano-sized Lonsdaleite, which ...

Diamonds are famous for their strength, but scientists have long suspected that another form of diamond might be even harder.

To synthesize the crystals, the team compressed highly ordered pyrolytic graphite to pressures as high as 20 gigapascals, ...

Researchers have synthesized millimetre-scale hexagonal diamond, a crystal structure so elusive that many physicists doubted ...

Diamonds may be the hardest naturally occurring substance on Earth, but space diamonds could be harder. Lonsdaleite, named after Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, a crystallographer and first woman fellow at ...

First identified in 1967, lonsdaleite is the hardest naturally-occuring mineral ever discovered—yes, it’s even harder than diamonds. Lonsdaleite, however, has only been found in meteorites, suggesting ...

In the case of lonsdaleite [hexagonla diamond], compression mechanism also caused bond-flipping, yielding an indentation strength of 152 GPa, which is 58 percent higher than the corresponding value of ...