New mineral found on the Moon

The finding shows that "space weather" can help create materials not seen on Earth, they reported in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new mineral is named hapkeite, after Bruce Hapke, an emeritus professor of geology and planetary sciences at Cornell University in New York, who predicted its discovery.

Airless bodies such as the moon, Mercury, and asteroids have an inorganic soil made of crushed rocks called regolith.

In theory, it is formed by the impact of micrometeorites traveling at high speed. The heat from their impact melts and vaporizes metals, which are then redeposited on rock fragments as tiny, scattered beads in a glassy coating.

Hapkeite is made when iron and silicon are deposited with two parts iron and one part silicon, Mahesh Anand of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and colleagues reported.

They analyzed a meteorite found in Oman for their report.

"We propose a scenario for the indigenous lunar formation of iron silicides that involves melting and vaporization of lunar soil by micrometeorite impact," they wrote.