As scientists hunt for superconductive materials, they found some inside one of the world’s largest meteorites from Australia. Superconductors are metals, organic materials, or ceramics, that conduct electrical current without resistance.
Conventional superconductors consist of niobium, lead, or mercury, which become superconducting when cooled to freezing temperatures, close to absolute zero. The material is highly coveted by engineers who study quantum computers and businesses who want to transfer energy more efficiently.
Ivan Schuller, the lead author of the study from UCSD, said:
The big takeaway is that there is superconductivity in the sky, naturally occurring.
The United States Air Force gave a grant to Schuller’s team six years ago to hunt for superconductivity in any material they could test. That’s when the team developed a device called magnetic field modulated microwave spectroscopy (MFMMS), which allows scientists to scan through abundant materials to find superconductors quickly.
The MFMMS starts with users putting tiny sample fragments into a tube filled with microwaves and an oscillating magnetic field and then freezing it. The samples that transform from conductors to superconductors are quite obvious because they absorb microwaves in a completely different way.
The team directed their hunt for superconductive materials towards meteorites, given that they form in extreme environments. After scanning hundreds of meteorite samples, they found evidence of superconductivity in samples from two meteorites:
- The Mundrabilla meteorite, a 9980-kilogram chunk of iron found in the Australian Outback in 1911,
- and Graves Nunataks (GRA 95205), a carbonaceous meteorite discovered in Antarctica in 1995.
The superconducting material found in those meteorites was an alloy of indium, tin, and lead, a metal previously known as a superconductor to researchers. However, it’s the first evidence of superconductivity in space.
Then, the team brought their samples to a pair of scientists Yimei Zhu and Shaobo Cheng, from the Brookhaven National Lab. After the experts inspected the fragments using electron microscopes, they confirmed that the samples were naturally occurring superconductors from space.
In March 2018, the team first presented their results at the meeting of the American Physical Society and published their peer-reviewed paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on March 23, 2020.
Munir Humayun, a prof at FSU who reviewed the study, said:
This paper opens the door on an entire field of inquiry to look at rare metals like these indium-tin-lead alloys not known from meteorites previously.
The discovery of the material already known on Earth doesn’t help Schuller’s team in their hunt for new superconductors. They ultimately hope to find extraterrestrial superconducting compounds unknown to humans. Until then, they plan to continue using the MFMMS device to scan through fragments that might hold exciting potential.
Also, researchers from Harvard University, Bruker Scientific and PLEX Corporation, found the first extraterrestrial protein ever identified, using new analysis techniques. It is a previously-unknown protein that they believe didn’t originate here on Earth because its building blocks differ chemically from terrestrial proteins.
