In the summer of 1945, atomic bombs struck the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A Science Advances paper published today details the discovery of a previously unknown, silicon-rich alloy that formed during the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The crystalline compound was a multicomponent alloy, or a mix of five or more principal metallic elements, according to the paper. These extreme events forged entirely new types of chemical compounds—not just simple deformations but complex structures with unique compositions. “We discovered a previously unknown, silicon-rich multicomponent alloy inside a microscopic spherule formed during the Hiroshima atomic blast,” Bindi, a geologist and crystallographer at the University of Florence in Italy, told Gizmodo.