Meteorites are quite rare since most materials in space never come anywhere near the Earth, and of those that do come toward Earth, most of them burn up in our atmosphere.

When a meteorite does survive past our atmosphere, it will usually be a small piece of rock. One might not even notice it as anything special if they didn’t know what they were looking for.

One type, however, known as a pallasite meteorite is very different. They are made of olive-green crystals that are composed of magnesium-iron silicate called olivine. This olivine is embedded entirely in a metal.

The Natural History Museum explains:

“Sometimes the olivine does not occur as a single crystal but as a cluster. Elsewhere it can create a pattern of veins through solid metal.”

According to UK’s National Space Center, only about 300 out of more than 60,000 known meteorites are pallasites. In addition to being rare, they are highly sought after because scientists do not know how they are formed, so the more of them that are discovered, the more research can be performed.

The National Space Center explains:

“The formation of pallasites is a subject of debate among scientists. Pallasites come from differentiated asteroids, which are asteroids that have melted, allowing them to separate into a layered structure of core, mantle and crust. The established theory for many years was that pallasites originate at the boundary between the core and the mantle, where iron from the core was squeezed up into the olivine in the mantle.”

If that is accurate, these meteorites could offer insights into how rocky planets like Earth are formed. Caroline Smith, the Head of Earth Sciences Collections at the National History Museum commented on this, saying:

“If we cut our Earth in half, we would also see an iron and nickel core in the middle. Around that would be the rocky mantle, and above that you would get the solid crust which is what we walk around on. We haven’t been able to drill down into the Earth’s core, but geologists, seismologists and other scientists can use pallasites as analogues for the composition and structure of our own Earth and get a good idea about its interior.”

There are other explanations for how these meteorites are formed as well, including saying that they come from larger asteroids that collided together in the distant past.

However they are formed, they are beautiful and very helpful when it comes to studying space, Earth, and much more.

I didn’t know meteorites could be so beautiful.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a quantum computer simulation that has “reversed time” and physics may never be the same.