Journal Khyber's Journal: Unknown Metal Found While Mining 2
I was breaking away some calcite when an unusual glimmer caught my attention.
I've run a few tests. It tarnishes black under oxidizing flame and does not emit a color. I cannot hold a sample well enough with any of my tools to get a scratch or streak test done.
http://imgur.com/a/PAHgz - a couple of pictures of the material, freed from the calcite matrix in which it was found.
It's dense. Water puffing easily moved dense garnet sand away from it while it remained relatively still.
The measurements taken on one sample grain were as follows: ~0.7mm length, ~0.7mm width, ~0.5mm thickness. Multimeter resistance measured at 35 Ohms. This gives me an electrical resistivity of 0.025 ohm meter, or 2.5 x 10^-2. I cannot find any metal with such listed electrical resistivity. My best bet would be that this is a semiconductor, given the relatively high resistivity, as pretty much every metal starts at 10^-6 to 10^-8.
I'm stumped!
found with calcite (Score:2)
Pyrite and galena are commonly found with calcite and quartz. Good bet those are smoothed pebbles of one or the other. Get on ebay and search for "pyrite quartz" or "pyrite calcite" for examples of how common that combination is. Some are quite stunning. Pyrite has a number of variations on it, such as calchopyrite etc.
It's probably not a pure element, that may account for your problem finding a resistivity match.
Re: (Score:2)
Not Chalcopyrite - wrong streak color.
Galena matches up with the electrical resistivity range but does not match up on Moh's hardness (Galena is roughly as hard as paper at 2.5-2.75, this scratches the paper without leaving a streak as one would expect with galena.)
Not pyrite that I can tell, too silvery-grey/black of a streak, no green.
Probably going to need to get a mass spectrometer test done.