For the first time, scientists have given a name to the "silicate mineral with a perovskite structure" that is the most abundant the Earth has: bridgmanite.

According to a Caltech press release, Chi Ma and Oliver Tschauner teamed up to analyze the naturally formed mineral, originally found in a meteorite. Bridgmanite is known to be present in the Earth's lower mantle, but scientists have only been able to study synthetic samples until this study.

The silicate perovskite mineral is formed in a high-pressure, high-temperature part of the Earth's mantle, which accounts for most of our planet's volume. The scientists named the mineral after Percy Bridgman, the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physics winner for his work in high-pressure physics.

"The most abundant mineral of the earth now has an official name," Chi Ma, a mineralogist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), said in the release.

Tschauner, an associate research professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, said bridgmanite's identification "fills a vexing gap in the taxonomy of minerals."

Previously known as (Mg,Fe)SiO3-perovskite, bridgmanite was impossible to extract since it is found in the Earth's lower mantle, about 400 miles beneath the surface. According to National Geographic, the Earth's mantle is about 1,802 miles thick and lies in between the core and the thin outer crust.

Ma and Tschauner were fortunate enough to come across their bridgmanite sample, which arrived on Earth via the 4.5-billion-year-old Tenham meteorite that crashed down in Australia in 1879.

The International Mineralogical Association's Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification approved the mineral's official name June 2.

"It is a really cool discovery," Ma said in the release. "Our finding of natural bridgmanite not only provides new information on shock conditions and impact processes on small bodies in the solar system, but the tiny bridgmanite found in a meteorite could also help investigations of phase transformation mechanisms in the deep Earth."