A new and important discovery in the field of planetary sciences has been scored by an all-Italian research team. It is the discovery of an extremely rare meteorite, as it contains extremely rare metal alloys of aluminum and copper and has materials with a forbidden symmetry, "quasicrystals", inside it. The discovery is described in a paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment belonging to the Nature-Portfolio editorial group. The strange meteorite was studied by a group of researchers from the University of Bari (Giovanna Agrosì, Daniela Mele, Gioacchino Tempesta and Floriana Rizzo of the Department of Earth and Geoenvironmental Sciences), in collaboration with the University of Florence (Luca Bindi and Tiziano Catelani of the Department of Earth Sciences) and the Italian Space Agency (Paola Manzari). The finding immediately proved to be exceptional: it is the third case in the world of extraterrestrial material containing metal alloys of this type and the second discovery of a micrometeorite containing a quasicrystal of natural origin, after the Khatyrka meteorite discovery in 2011, thanks to a very expensive and adventurous international expedition that had gone as far as the Russian Far East borders, in Chukotka, the place where the meteorite that gave it its name was found.
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