A decade after asteroid 2008 TC3 exploded over the Nubian Desert in northern Sudan, leaving behind a collection of small meteorites that would later be known as Almahata Sitta, researchers are still uncovering puzzling new details about this remarkable space rock. Diamond-studded meteorites came from the collision of a lost planet

When our solar system was in its infancy 4.5 billion years ago, a swarm of protoplanets swirled around the sun—some of which coalesced into larger and larger masses, while others were blasted to smithereens in a demolition derby of planetary proportions. Unlike other meteorites, which can be traced to parent bodies such as asteroids, Mars or the moon by comparing the ratios of different varieties of elements, these rocks have no known source. Some were thrown out of the solar system," Farhang Nabiei, lead author of the paper and a scientist with the Earth and Planetary Science Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, told CBC News. The diamonds in the meteorite have tiny crystals inside them that would have required great pressure to form

The parent planetary body from which they formed is believed to have been catastrophically disrupted by an impact during the first 10 million years of the solar system. “These samples are coming from an era that we don’t have any access to,” said Farhang Nabiei, a materials scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and the lead author of the new report.
New research suggests the Almahata Sitta meteorites are evidence of a lost additional planet in the Solar system.