COMET DIAMONDS from SPACE found in Libya's glass desert

A team of scientists from the University of the Witwatersrand have discovered the first evidence of a comet's impact on Earth – a small black pebble filled with diamonds. comet Frying tonight... "Comets always visit our skies – they're these dirty snowballs of ice mixed with dust – but never before in history has material …

[WhoaWhoa]

Exclusive: "Geeks" call scientists "boffins".

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean the pebble is more exclusive than gold?

When's the next flight out to...

[Anonymous Coward]

I call hypegasm

"Comets contain the very secrets to unlocking the formation of our solar system and this discovery gives us an unprecedented opportunity to study comet material first hand .."

Well yes but I suspect you need to study them in their natural habitat - The secrets of the solar system would have been well and truly scorched by the entry & impact.

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

Re: I call hypegasm

Agreed, collecting pristine cometary material is far removed from stuff that entered our atmosphere and was subjected to a tremendous pummelling.

After all, scientists want to do the pummelling themselves. Much more fun (and you can control the pummelling).

[Tom 7]

Re: I call hypegasm

Reproducing the effects is pretty difficult. Some of this stuff comes in a 70Km/s, gets heated in a massive atmospheric impact which slows it down to near zero and it gets hit by something travelling at 70Km/s.

And that glass scarab is made from earth sand that got heated by the sky being turned into one massive grill and wont tell us jack about the comet itself

[Pascal Monett]

Re: wont tell us jack about the comet itself

I'm not sure you can say that.

The content of the comet might have influenced what kind of radiation bathed the sand and we might be able to discern that, deduct the cometary composition and make educated guesses about its trajectory and speed.

Science is a vast and complicated field, and new elements of information can come from very unexpected places.

[Martin Budden]

Meteorite Men

I bet the Meteorite Men have already booked their plane tickets. Where there's one comet fragment there may be many more.

[Mikel]

Amazing coincidence

That scarab being on the boy king, made of comet glass and laid out with wings like that.

[Don Jefe]

Vessels

Did anyone else notice the little doodads on the bottom of the necklace? The two on the outside look exactly like lava lamps and the ones in the middle look like red wine glasses... Also the 'comet scarab' looks suspiciously like a gummy candy.

I'm not sure what this means, but I shall contemplate the issue while watching my suspiciously similar lava lamp and drinking red wine from a very similar glass. Alas, I have no gummy candies, nor knowledge of where to buy gummy scarabs.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Don Jefe

We're all happy to see that your post count is coming along nicely.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @Don Jefe

Don't be nasty, leave the boy alone!

[Nunyabiznes]

Re: Vessels

You completely missed the 3 ornaments in the bottom row that look amazingly like the Apollo capsules.

[Big_Boomer]

I have a name for the stone

Lucy,..... as in Lucy from the Sky with Diamonds,...... I'll get my coat

[Evil Auditor]

Re: I have a name for the stone

Yes, yes... But do you start to hallucinate when you lick the stone?

[Graham Marsden]

@Big_Boomer - Re: I have a name for the stone

Too late, see Arthur C Clarke's 2061 for details :-)

[Semianonymous Megacoward]

It's elementary

Picking nits here: the material is carbonaceous -- carbon-rich -- and probably not carboniferous, the word used in the article. Carboniferous means "coal-bearing" and was a geologic time period ending about 300 million years ago, much younger than cometary material. Coal-bearing comets would be pretty cool, but the only fossils I've seen in comets or meteorites to date have been in science fiction stories.

Carbonaceous chondrites are a carbon-rich class of meteorites, some of which contain inclusions predating our solar system. Carbonaceous chondrites presumably derive from C-type asteroids.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the first cometary material recovered on Earth either

High-flying U2 sample flights have regularly brought back pieces of cometary dust (it's kind of fluffy) from the stratosphere where it can be found amongst meteroids, volcanic ash and the occasional fragment of solid rocket booster exhaust (LOHAN's will be added soon)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not the first cometary material recovered on Earth either

Chicxulub iridium?

[Loyal Commenter]

Re: Not the first cometary material recovered on Earth either

Meteoritic, not cometary. i.e. - it came from a rocky body originating in the inner solar system, rather than an icy one originating in the oort cloud, which is considerably further away.

[breakfast]

Re: Not the first cometary material recovered on Earth either

And yet they still haven't found what they're looking for.

[Stevie]

Bah!

We must send in -T-h-e--M-a-r-i-n-e-s- a scientific peacekeeping force to secure this valuable desert of diamonds for democracy immediately!

Restart the government! Tell Halliburton there's a new -c-a-s-h--c-o-w- revenue stream up for grabs! Defrost Vice President Cheney and the rest of the Completely Unaffiliated With Big Armaments Think Tank!

Begin Operation Sparkly Freedom of Democracy!

[qwertyuiop]

I for one...

...welcome our new bling-covered overlords!

[stu 4]

what a load of cobblers

It's far more likely that this was created during a fight between superheros - perhaps superman and cyclops.

Have they checked that they didn't shoot some of the movies there in the past* ?

*I am assuming they must shoot the superhero type movies in the middle of deserts somewhere for safety.