The person is Alice Klein.

Electron microscope image of hexagonal diamond in a meteorite

There are hexagonal diamonds in meteorites found in Africa.

Alan Salek is a researcher at RMIT.

Four meteorites in north-west Africa contain hexagonal diamonds that aren't normally found on Earth.

Alan Salek, a member of the team that found them, said that there were some people in the field who doubted whether the material existed.

Regular diamonds are made of carbon, but hexagonal diamonds are made of hexagonal structure.

The first hexagonal diamonds were found in meteorites in the US and India in the 1960s. It was difficult to confirm if the crystals were hexagonal diamonds because they were so small.

Salek and his colleagues used a microscope to peer into meteorites. The others were from north-west Africa.

They found hexagonal diamonds in four of the African meteorites, with some measuring up to a micrometre in size. The unusual hexagonal structure was confirmed by this.

Salek says that it is an important discovery because they can get a better idea of how they formed in the lab.

The hexagonal diamonds are thought to have formed inside dwarf planets based on the chemical composition of the meteorites that brought them to Earth.

The team believes the crystals were created by a supercritical fluid of hydrogen, methane, oxygen and sulphur chemicals that formed when an asteroid crashed into the dwarf planet.

It was like taking a lid off a Coke bottle when the planet broke apart.

It's similar to the process by which regular diamonds are made in labs, by heating graphite with gases like hydrogen and methane, suggesting that a few tweaking could make lonsdaleite instead.

If they could be made synthetically, hexagonal diamonds would be 60 per cent harder than regular diamonds, and they could be used for industrial purposes. Salek says they could be used to make machine parts.

The journal was published by the National Academy of Sciences.

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