In 2008, chunks of space rock crashed in the deserts of Sudan. Diamonds discovered inside one of the recovered meteorites may have come from a destroyed planet that orbited our sun billions of years ago, scientists said on Tuesday. If confirmed, they say, it would be the first time anyone has recovered fragments from one of our solar system’s so-called “lost” planets.

“We have in our hands a piece of a former planet that was spinning around the sun before the end of the formation of today’s solar system,” said Philippe Gillet, a planetary scientist at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland and an author of the paper that was published in Nature Communications.