Second natural quasicrystal found in 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite

A team from Princeton University and the University of Florence in Italy has discovered a quasicrystal--so named because of its unorthodox arrangement of atoms--in a 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite from a remote region of northeastern Russia, bringing to two the number of natural quasicrystals ever discovered. Prior to the team finding the first natural quasicrystal in 2009, researchers thought that the structures were too fragile and energetically unstable to be formed by natural processes.