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What about large quantities of quartz crystals ? That would seem much more probable than diamond and wouldn't have the sublimation problem of water ice in a va

• ChuckMcM 11y ago
  Certainly possible, except that quartz crystals grow in hot watery solutions, and those are equally hard to come by in space. It would be interesting to stack up the set of conditions that would need to be true for them to form, perhaps a watery core undergoing tidal heating while silica dust is deposited on the surface and transported by meteor impact into the internals of the asteroid. A lot of steps though. For what its worth its also why the metals idea are statistically unlikely, as the distillation out of various metals would be hard to explain. That also makes the puzzle exciting though, the harder it is to guess what it is, the more interesting the answer in my experience.