A meteorite fell to the Earth almost a decade ago. This meteorite, also known as the Almahata Sitta meteorite, provides compelling evidence that a "lost planet" once roamed around our solar system billion years ago. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.
According to the researchers from Germany, Switzerland, and France, the diamond found inside the meteorite has been created by a proto-planet about 4.55 billion years ago. The Almahata Sitta meteorite crashed into the Earth in October 2008 at the Nubian Desert.
Scientists believed that the early solar system has a lot of planets and that some of them are little more than a mass of molten magma. Among these is Theia, an embryo planet, which was assumed to have crashed into the young Earth, ejecting a massive amount of debris that later formed the moon.
Philippe Gillet, one of the co-authors of the study said, that the diamonds found in the meteorite needs to have great pressure to form. Gillet, who is a planetary scientist at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, revealed that the researchers estimated a pressure of 200,000 bar (2.9 million psi). This pressure highly needed to be able to create such diamonds, wherein it suggests that the mysterious or the "lost planet" is as big as Mercury or Mars.
Furthermore, meteorite expert Addi Bischoff from the University of Muenster, Germany, noted that the methods and conclusion of the study are plausible. However, additional evidence of maintained high pressure would be anticipated to be observed in the minerals surrounding the diamonds.