The nuclear age began bright and early at 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, when the United States government detonated a plutonium-powered implosion device (nicknamed “Gadget”) over the New Mexico desert. In a fraction of a second, the explosion released the equivalent of 21,000 tons of TNT — enough to vaporize the surrounding infrastructure and sweep desert sand into a hot, pressurized fireball that spit out trinitite glass.
The vast majority of the glass was a pale green color, thanks to a composition of quartz and feldspar. But in one area of the site, scientists recovered unusual, blood-red trinitite samples imbued with metals from the test site’s obliterated 30-meter-tall tower and miles of wires. Hidden deep within one of these samples was something even more unusual — a 'forbidden' type of matter known as a quasicrystal — but nearly eight decades came and went before scientists began searching for it.
In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences earlier this year, the researchers behind its discovery estimate that the quasicrystal materialized in temperatures above 2700 degrees Fahrenheit and pressures of 5000 to 8000 pascals. To you and me, it would feel similar to lying inside a volcano while someone carrying thousands of elephants (presumably stacked vertically) stands on your back.
