Tutankhamun's desert glass scarab
A jewel carved from glass made by a cosmic impact.
Among Tutankhamun's treasures is a gold pectoral jewel with a winged scarab at its centre. The scarab is carved from a yellow-green, see-through material that puzzled experts for decades.
In 1998 the Italian mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele identified it as Libyan Desert Glass, a natural glass found only in the Great Sand Sea of western Egypt. The glass is almost pure silica and formed about 29 million years ago.
Most scientists think the glass was created by the enormous heat of a meteorite impact or an airburst, which melted the desert sand. That makes the scarab one of the few known jewels whose material was made by an event from space.