A picture taken on a recent visit to British Museum of Natural History

Diamonds from star dust
Cold Bokkeveld, stony meteorite (CM@ chondrite). fell 1838, Cold Bokkeveld, South Africa.

If you look carefully in the bottom of this little tube, you can see a white smudge of powder. this smudge is made up of millions of microscopic diamonds. These are the oldest things you will ever see. They formed in the dust around dying stars billions of years ago, before our solar system existed. The diamonds dispersed in space and eventually became part of the material that formed our solar system. Ultimately, some of them fell to Earth in meteorites, like the ones you see here.

iphone 11

trimmed the borders