King Tut wore an antique yellow glass, sandblasted by meteors

About 29 million years ago, the sands of the western Egyptian desert melted and created tiny pieces of canary yellow glass, some of which finished decorating the chestpiece of King Tut.

This natural glass, found over thousands of square kilometers in western Egypt, would be due to one of two events: impact of a meteorite on the surface of the Earth or aerial explosion, explosion that occurs when a rock of space enters the atmosphere of our planet. . [Photos: Giant Spiral Grows Out of Egypt’s Desert]

A new study suggests that it is old. Australian and Austrian researchers reported May 2 in the journal Geology that the glass contained pieces of a "shocked" mineral called reidite, which only forms during a meteorite impact.

The heat created by meteorite impacts or an explosion would have been enough to liquefy sand in the desert, creating glass particles. But while aerial breezes create shock waves in the air that can represent thousands of pascals (a pressure unit), asteroid impacts cause shock waves of billions of pascals to the ground, have writes the researchers. (In other words, meteorite impacts create shock waves that are subjected to millions of times more pressure than those created by explosions.)

These ground shock waves, but not the air explosions, are powerful enough to create reidite as well.

In this new study, the researchers analyzed the zircon grains contained in the glass; the scientists discovered that it contained evidence of the earlier presence of reidite.

In other words, its constituents are oriented to indicate a reidite present once, transformed at a given moment in zircon. This provides the first "unequivocal" proof that the glass was created by high-pressure shock waves, and therefore by a meteorite impact, the researchers wrote in the study.

"Meteorite impacts are catastrophic events, but they are not common," said co-author Aaron Cavosie, principal investigator at Curtin University in Australia, in a statement. "Air explosions occur more frequently, but we now know that we should not expect a glass formation event in the Libyan desert in the near future, which is comforting".

Originally published on Science live.