For the first time ever, scientists have gotten a glimpse of the most abundant mineral in nature.
The mineral, enclosed inside a 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite, has been characterized and named recently by two researchers from the University of Nevada, according to Discovery.com.
The new official name of the mineral, bridgmanite, was approved for the mineral formerly known by its chemical components and crystal structure, silicate-perovskite.
The mineral was named after Percy Bridgman, a 1946 Nobel Prize-winning physicist, according to the blog American Geophysical Union.
"It is a very exciting discovery," Chi Ma of Caltech and Oliver Tschauner, said to Live Science. "We finally tracked down natural silicate-perovskite (now bridgmanite) in a meteorite after a five-year investigation, and got to name the most abundant mineral on Earth. How cool is that?"
The mineral most likely resides beneath Earth's surface in a location called the lower mantle, which can be found between the transition zone in the mantle and the core-mantle boundary, or between the depths of 416 and 1,802 miles, according Discovery.com.
Researchers have been searching for the mineral for a while now, mainly because in order to identify a mineral they must know its crystal structure and chemical composition.
The bridmanite was discovered in a meteorite that fell to Earth near the Tenham station in western Queensland, Australia back in 1879.
The meteorite endured high pressures and temperatures as it slammed into other rocks in space, according to Discovery.com. Researchers believe those impacts created shock veins of minerals within the meteorites.
"Scientists have identified high-pressure minerals in its shock-melt veins since 1960s. Now we have identified bridgmanite," Tschauner said.
The researchers used a number of methods to characterize the extracted mineral, including high-resolution scanning electron microscopy, and synchrotron X-ray diffraction mapping.
Ma and Tschauner submitted their data for review to the International Mineralogical Association's Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification (CNMNC) after five years of work, according to the AGU blog.
The mineral and new name were approved by the commission on June 2.
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