STRANGE parents should have unusual offspring. Sure enough, when
two carbon "onions" collide, a nanodiamond is born. It's an
insight into the weird chemistry that arises in outer space.
Meteorites are home to diamonds a few nanometres wide but how
these tiny crystals form is a mystery. A precursor could be the
equally exotic nested carbon cages called carbon onions that
lurk in interstellar space. When Nigel Marks of Curtin
University in Perth, Australia, and colleagues simulated
collisions between two carbon onions, and carbon onions and dust
grains, both produced nanodiamonds (Physical Review Letters,
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.075503). Clouds of dust around
ageing, carbon-rich stars and dusty planet-forming discs could
host such collisions. When the dust gets baked into asteroids,
chips can fall to Earth as meteorites. If you would like to
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