If it’s moon dust he should be worried about a four-letter agency: NASA.
Mostly water, but if my vial is full of dust and not water even at room temperature, it’s presumably made of that other stuff, filtered from water or ice dust.
That makes the job much harder, because to the best of my knowledge, outside of biological chemistry, there’s nothing that we can detect that we can’t synthesize. The only hope for catching a fraud would be to think of a test that the fraudsters didn’t think of.
(and I specified “biological chemistry” rather than “organic chemistry” because we have found some organic chemicals in space, but they’re all very simple ones that we could synthesize).
Actually, for that matter, do we have to worry about the opposite problem? An extraterrestrial laboratory making something designed to appear terrestrial in origin?
Vigilo confido
There are crystal structures in iron meteorites that we can’t reproduce because of the timescales involved. To form the patterns requires very slow cooling from molten metal. Up until very recently that cooling rate was thought to be as slow as 1 degree per million years. A recent study indicates that it can happen much faster but even the fastest figure of 6,000 degrees per million years means .006 degrees per year.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0016703785900328
one leaves deposits around bathtubs and the other doesn’t?
Serious answer: The O16:O18 ratio will be different. Probably the H:D (hydrogen:deuterium) ratio too.
If the “powdery substance” was some amount of micro-granular alloy consisting of light-weight aluminum and ultra-dense osmium…something that could only be smelted and forged in a 0G environment…that would, by definition, be extra-terrestrial.
Yikes, the Western Australian Museum needs a better proofreader. The use of “natural” instead of “naturally” is annoying but not as bad as the gross factual errors. Perhaps they mean “nucleons” instead of “neutrons”?
They found the zirconium crystals in some very old Australian rocks were older than the earth.
So those crystals could not have come from earth, could they. This relies on the validity of the zirconium crystal dating technique.
This week’s meteorite in Germany appears to be a HED.
I think you mean zircon crystals, not zirconium. They are not older than the earth. The oldest one found is 4.4 billion years old.
I think this is a misreading of the crystals being dated as older than their very old host rock.
Actually it turns out to be an aubrite.