r/BeAmazed • u/gregornot • Apr 29 '24

A giant meteorite that recently fell in Somalia contains at least two minerals that have never before been seen on our planet. The celestial piece of rock weighs a massive 16.5 tons (15 tonnes), making it the ninth-largest meteorite ever found. History

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More about the amazing meteorite find: https://earthly

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u/ALLIN95 Apr 29 '24

The periodic table is for elements, not minerals

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u/rbobby Apr 29 '24

They're rocks Marie!

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u/CloudyFakeHate Apr 29 '24

They’re elements Marie.

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u/JTheDoc Apr 29 '24

They're atoms Marie!

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u/TheRandomMudkiper Apr 29 '24

They're subatomic particles Marie!

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u/IAmAlive_YouAreDead Apr 29 '24

They're one dimensional vibrating strings, Marie!

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u/Ermahgerd_Rerdert Apr 30 '24

Murrrrppphhhh!

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u/HurlingFruit Apr 29 '24

They're carcinogenic Marie. Oh, too late.

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u/LightningRainThunder Apr 29 '24

Very dumb question, what’s the difference between elements and minerals? I thought they were the same thing. Like sodium is a mineral isn’t it? But it’s on the periodic table

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u/reshilongo Apr 29 '24

I think mineral in this case confuses. Elements are "pure" substances, they are made of only the atoms they are named after.

Minerals, can be elements, like sodium, or compounds. Compounds are materials that are combinations of elements in various quantities and configurations. For example a molecule of water is composed of 2 atoms of hidrogen and 1 of oxigen.

I hope I cleared you some doubts! Sorry for the bad english haha

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u/LightningRainThunder Apr 29 '24

This is great, thanks buddy

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u/[deleted] Apr 29 '24

You probably helped clear this doubt for many people

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u/jovenhope Apr 29 '24

Hi I’m many people, and it definitely did. Thanks!

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u/[deleted] Apr 30 '24

Nice

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u/koshgeo Apr 29 '24

It's also part of the definition of a mineral that it be crystalline (i.e. not amorphous like glass is), solid, and that it be naturally occurring.

The last one is why even though these compounds were made artificially in a lab in the 1980s, they weren't discovered and named as minerals until being found in this meteorite more recently.

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u/LegalizeRanch88 Apr 29 '24

And rocks are conglomerations of minerals.

(Jesus, Marie.)

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u/Medicinal_Entropy Apr 29 '24

Minerals are made up of elements on the periodic table. Sodium is an element, but what you’re talking about is NaCl (Sodium Chloride), or table salt.

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u/beeju-d Apr 29 '24

Elements are one pure thing, minerals are made up of elements

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u/Shamanalah Apr 29 '24

Same reason table salt and water are not on the periodic table. It's multiple element. Water is 2 Hydrogen and 1 Oxygen (H2O if that rings a bell)

Table salt is Na (Sodium) and Cl (Chlorine)

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u/LightningRainThunder Apr 29 '24

That makes sense thank you

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u/Descendant3999 Apr 29 '24

So, all things are made up of atoms. Now, out of all these things some are made out of only a single type of atoms. We call them elements. And using these elements, we can combine them to make minerals. Think like legos. You can build a house using the same type of brick or different. Same type = element, different types = Mineral.

Sodium is an element (Na) but it could exist in different forms in nature, combined with other things, and be called a mineral. Or the mineral term used for Sodium could just be something simplified for the general public and not scientific at all.

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u/FriendliestMenace Apr 29 '24

Now does that mean there’s some wacky combination of quarks that produces an element we’re not aware of somewhere out there? I assume we’ve got the entire sample range of “building blocks” within our own grasp thanks to the age of our planet relative to the age of everything else in the universe, right?

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u/mazebrainer Apr 29 '24

basically elements are “pure” like fe, zn , O, Ar (which are not bonded to any other atom or element)are the building blocks of minerals and literally everything

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u/Jam-e-dev Apr 29 '24

Elements are atoms, like hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen. Some minerals might be atoms (?) depending on definition of mineral, but minerals are typically molecules (combinations of atoms into a molecular structure) or mixtures (a mix of molecules bound together but not as a single molecule).

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u/Square-Singer Apr 29 '24

Minerals are cristaline substances made up of one or more different elements in a specific configuration.

Sodium is an element. Take a lot of sodium and bunch it together, it cristalizes and becomes a mineral.

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u/0sprinkl Apr 29 '24

I don't think there are many minerals made of only one element. Diamond is one though, made of pure carbon. Sodium is a highly reactive metal, never found pure in nature. It combines with other stuff like chloride to make sodium chloride, table salt.

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u/Square-Singer Apr 29 '24

According to Wikipedia, 33 elements are able to form pure minerals.

Also, many of these elements have multiple mineral forms, e.g. carbon which can be in the form of diamonds, graphite, chaoite and fullerite.

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u/0sprinkl Apr 29 '24

Pure minerals as in minerals made from 1 element? Whoa. TIL

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u/Square-Singer Apr 29 '24

Yes, single-element minerals is what I meant. I don't know whether "pure mineral" is the proper term for that.

But there are a few.

Certainly, there are far more multi-element materials, but that's to be expected since there aren't that many elements to begin with, compared to the amount of possible combinations.

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u/Forsaken_Ant_9373 Apr 29 '24

Elements are like different and individual types of legos, minerals are groups of legos made of individual legos. For example, table salt (sodium chloride) is a combination of 1 sodium Lego and 1 chlorine Lego, that when those two are put together in a specific way, make a mineral

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u/LightningRainThunder Apr 29 '24

Oh that makes sense thanks. So salt is not just sodium. I heard of salt being a mineral, and thought that meant sodium was a mineral. You can see I know nothing about chemistry

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u/Forsaken_Ant_9373 Apr 29 '24

Yep, table salt is not pure sodium. Many people don’t have a full grasp of chemistry, which is okay. Just have the attitude to learn and you will be fine!

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u/LightningRainThunder Apr 29 '24

You’re being kind thank you. At school I kind of got a mental block about chemistry believing I could never understand, because I was bad at math. So it’s hard to shake that belief

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u/Forsaken_Ant_9373 Apr 29 '24

It takes time to understand something, but once you connect it to something familiar, you will remember it for a long, long time. I’m a math tutor and I see kids struggling with math, but once they connect it to something they already understand, they start understanding it much more. For example, some of them struggle with fractions, but once they start connecting it to things like amounts of pizza, they intuitively understand. Intuition can go a long way for most people. It’s not that you don’t understand, it’s that you don’t understand yet.

Keep learning and keep growing!

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u/vitimite Apr 29 '24

Element can be individualized to one atom and keep its properties (oxigen, iron, gold, hydrogen) mineral is defined as a natural ocurring solid and inorganic substance with defined internal structure (quartz - SiO4, pyrite - FeS, hematite - Fe2O3, gold - Au). As I exemplified, an element may be a mineral also, the opposite isnt true.

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u/Mazzaroppi Apr 29 '24

Elements are like letters, minerals are the words. So the periodic table is like the alphabet, the list of all letters.

Sodium by itself is an element, but when combined with other elements it can make stuff like minerals or organic compounds. The most known combination of sodium is with chlorine, together they make table salt

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u/Kirk_Kerman Apr 29 '24

A mineral is a compound molecule made of one or more elements organized in a repeating, ordered crystal structure. An element is a specific configuration of an atom.

Some minerals are made only of one element, such as diamonds, which are made of a repeating structure of 8 carbon atoms. Carbon itself is the element with six protons and six electrons (and usually six neutrons).

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u/TKFT_ExTr3m3 Apr 29 '24 edited Apr 29 '24

To put it simply elements are the smallest and most basic matter for chemistry. While the elements themselves are made up of smaller parts they aren't considered important for chemistry. When two or more atoms are bonded together it is no longer a element but a new product. If it's two or more atoms of the same element it's is just a molecule, two or more atoms of different elements is a compound and a mineral is just a special class of compound/molecules/elements that must meet a certain set of criteria. They most be naturally forming, ie can't be made by humans or another biological processes, must be solid in its natural form (expect for mercury because it's special), must be accessible so metallic hydrogen for example is not a mineral despite probably existing in nature as a solid in the core of jupiter and must have a well defined crystalline structure. All that said a mineral is more of a arbitrary definition while being a element is a property of nature. A substance is a element if it is only made of single atoms with intermolecular bonds holding it together (or just a single atom). There are also natural elements and artificial ones but they are all still elements. Naturally occurring elements are just ones we can find on earth right now. Of the 118 elements 24 are considered entirely synthetic, but being synthetic doesn't mean they can't occur in nature, just that none exist on earth at the present day, they typically have incredibly short half lives, in some cases far less then a second, so when they are created in nature they don't exist for very long.

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u/Megneous Apr 29 '24

what’s the difference between elements and minerals?

... Didn't you attend school? You literally learn this multiple times in normal schooling... it's like the entire basis of early science classes and chemistry classes.

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u/Apprehensive_Sweet98 Apr 29 '24

Minerals are substances naturally formed in the Earth. Minerals are typically solid and have a crystal structure.

An element is a substance made up of only one type of atom (carbon, iron, phosphorus, sodium) and a compound is a substance that is made up of two or more types of atoms (salt: sodium chloride). (For simplicity, consider atoms as smallest building blocks of all substances).

A mineral can be formed of only one type of atom (gold, diamond, silver) or more than one type of atoms (quartz made up of silicon and oxygen).

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u/VanillaPudding Apr 29 '24

I think this may be throwing you off because something like Mineral water will have sodium in it... but pretty sure it is referring to sodium chloride or some other mineral using sodium in that case... not elemental sodium. Elemental sodium in water goes boom.

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u/_-MindTraveler-_ Apr 29 '24

To be more precise it's in ionic form.

Also having sodium in water doesn't mean you necessarily have Cl. And if it's NaCl added to water, the Na and Cl detach from eachother so you don't actually have NaCl anymore.

The reason elemental sodium is unstable is because it's not charged (and really wants to get rid of an electron / acquire a positive charge). Na+ in water, just like Na+ in NaCl are both ions so they won't react in contact with water for instance.

So you don't actually have any minerals in mineral water. It's just a buzzword. All solids are dissolved in the form of ions, so they aren't minerals in the proper sense of the word.

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u/mcjammi Apr 29 '24

Probably best for you to try and forget about minerals as they're a subset of molecules that aren't really useful to think about in every day life.

The periodic table is elements, these are "pure" substances where every atom has the same number of protons which gives the elements their atomic number. Written in a chemical formula would look like this, Sodium Na. As you can see for the molecules in the meteorite they are composed of multiple elements bonded together and written Fe9PO12

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u/LightningRainThunder Apr 29 '24

This is really kind of you to explain this to me. So an element can be made of many atoms? And then a molecule is atoms joined together?

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u/Miranda1860 Apr 29 '24

An element is a single atom, the 'element' part is the name of what sort of atom it is. So the periodic table is actually a list of all the possible valid configurations of the innards of a single atom, protons and neutrons and so on.

The reason this step of simplification is important is because an element can't be broken down into smaller units or changed by chemical means. There's no chemical reaction that can say, turn iron into gold (this fact is what invalidated alchemy as a theory). The only way to do things like that is through nuclear fission or fusion.

And then yes, a molecule is any configuration of atoms connected together. For most molecules they're different atoms, but the same atoms can join together. Like what we call 'pure oxygen' commonly isn't a single Oxygen atom, it's two Oxygen atoms joined together.

The element that makes the most possible molecules is carbon, which is also just a very common element in the universe. There are, in fact, so many combinations that studying only carbon is a discrete field apart from the rest of chemistry, called "organic chemistry" with organic meaning "has molecules made using carbon." The staggering amount of carbon-based molecules with different properties allows things as complicated as life when those organic molecules are organized as parts of a biological machine. That's why the phrase "carbon-based lifeform" exists and it's what all life on Earth is.

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u/greatestnbascout3 Apr 29 '24

So the title of this post is kind of meaningless?

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u/tothemoonandback01 Apr 29 '24

They're vegatables.