Scientists Stunned by Alien Mineral That Breaks the Rules of Heat

A rare mineral found in a centuries-old meteorite — and even on Mars — has stunned scientists with its bizarre heat behavior.

Neither fully crystal nor fully glass, this hybrid material conducts heat in a way unlike anything else known: it stays constant across temperatures instead of rising or falling.

Why Heat-Conduction Matters in Modern Technology

Crystals and glasses handle heat in completely different ways, a property that plays an important role in many modern technologies. These include everything from making electronics smaller and more efficient, to recovering wasted heat for energy, to extending the life of thermal shields used in aerospace.

Improving the performance and durability of the materials behind these technologies depends on understanding how their chemistry and atomic arrangement (for example, crystalline, glassy, or nanostructured) affects the way they carry heat. Michele Simoncelli, an assistant professor of applied physics and applied mathematics at Columbia Engineering, studies this challenge from first principles. In Aristotle’s words, he works from “the first basis from which a thing is known,” starting with the core equations of quantum mechanics and applying machine-learning methods to solve them with precise accuracy.

Meteorites, Mars, and a Hybrid Discovery

In findings published on July 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Simoncelli teamed up with Nicola Marzari of the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne and Francesco Mauri of Sapienza University of Rome to predict the existence of a material that blends the thermal behavior of crystals and glasses. A research group led by Etienne Balan, Daniele Fournier, and Massimiliano Marangolo at Sorbonne University in Paris later confirmed the prediction through experimental measurements.

This unique material was first identified in meteorites and has also been detected on Mars. The physics behind its unusual heat-handling abilities could lead to new ways of designing materials that withstand extreme temperature differences, while also offering clues about the thermal history of planets.

Crystals vs. Glasses: How Atomic Structure Impacts Heat

Thermal conduction depends on whether a material is crystalline, with an ordered lattice of atoms, or glassy, with a disordered, amorphous structure, which influences how heat flows at the quantum level–broadly speaking, thermal conduction in crystals typically decreases with increasing temperature, while in glasses it increases upon heating.

In 2019, Simoncelli, Nicola Marzari, and Francesco Mauri derived a single equation that captures the opposite thermal-conductivity trends observed in crystals and glasses—and, most importantly, also describes the intermediate behavior of defective or partially disordered materials, such as those used in thermoelectrics for waste-heat recovery, perovskite solar cells, and thermal barrier coatings for heat shields.

Meteorite Silica Reveals Rare Thermal Constancy

Using this equation, they investigated the relationship between atomic structure and thermal conductivity in materials made from silicon dioxide, one of the main components of sand. They predicted that a particular “tridymite” form of silicon dioxide, described in the 1960s as typical of meteorites, would exhibit the hallmarks of a hybrid crystal-glass material with a thermal conductivity that remains unchanged with temperature. This unusual thermal-transport behavior bears analogies with the invar effect in thermal expansion, for which the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in 1920.

That led the team to the experimental groups of Etienne Balan, Daniele Fournier, and Massimiliano Marangolo in France, who obtained special permission from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris to perform experiments on a sample of silica tridymite carved from a meteorite that landed in Steinbach, Germany, in 1724. Their experiments confirmed their predictions: meteoric tridymite has an atomic structure that falls between an orderly crystal and disordered glass, and its thermal conductivity remains essentially constant over the experimentally accessible temperature range of 80 K to 380 K.

Upon further investigation, the team also predicted that this material could form from decade-long thermal aging in refractory bricks used in furnaces for steel production. Steel is one of the most essential materials in modern society, but producing it is carbon-intensive: just 1 kg of steel emits approximately 1.3 kg of carbon dioxide, with the nearly 1 billion tons produced each year accounting for about7% of carbon emissions in the U.S. Materials derived from tridymite could be used to more efficiently control the intense heat involved in steel production, helping to reduce the steel industry’s carbon footprint.

AI, Quantum Physics, and the Future of Heat Control

In this new PNAS paper, Simoncelli employed machine-learning methods to overcome the computational bottlenecks of traditional first-principles methods and simulate atomic properties that influence heat transport with quantum-level accuracy. The quantum mechanisms that govern heat flow through hybrid crystal-glass materials may also help us understand the behavior of other excitations in solids, such as charge-carrying electrons and spin-carrying magnons. Research on these topics is shaping emerging technologies, including wearable devices powered by thermoelectrics, neuromorphic computing, and spintronic devices that exploit magnetic excitations for information processing.

Simoncelli’s group at Columbia is exploring these topics, structured around three core pillars: the formulation of first-principles theories to predict experimental observables, the development of AI simulation methods for quantitatively accurate predictions of materials properties, and the application of theory and methods to design and discover materials to overcome targeted industrial or engineering challenges.

Reference: “Temperature-invariant crystal–glass heat conduction: From meteorites to refractories” by Michele Simoncelli, Daniele Fournier, Massimiliano Marangolo, Etienne Balan, Keevin Béneut, Benoit Baptiste, Béatrice Doisneau, Nicola Marzari and Francesco Mauri, 11 July 2025,Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2422763122

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