Man Keeps Rock For Years, Hoping It’s Gold. It Turned Out to Be Way More Valuable.
In 2015, David Hole was conducting research in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia.
Equipped with a metal detector, he discovered something extraordinary; a very heavy reddish rock resting on yellow clay.
He took it home, and, being sure that the rock contained a nugget of gold, tried everything to open it; After all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region where Australia’s gold rush reached its peak in the 19th century.
To take apart his invention, Hole tried a rock saw, angle grinder and drill, and even doused it with acid. But even a sledgehammer couldn’t crack it. Because what he worked so hard to open was not a gold nugget.
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like that I learned it years laterIt was a rare meteorite.
There is a summary in the video below:
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“It had a playful, pitted appearance,” said Melbourne Museum geologist Dermot Henry. said Sydney Morning Herald In 2019.
“This happens when they enter the atmosphere; they melt outside and the atmosphere shapes them.”
Unable to open the ‘rock’ but still intrigued, Hole took the nugget to the Melbourne Museum for identification.
Dermot Henry and Melbourne Museum geologist Bill Birch with the Maryborough meteorite. (Museums Victoria)
“I looked at a lot of rocks that people thought were meteors,” Henry told Channel 10 News.
In fact, after working at the museum for 37 years and examining thousands of rocks, Henry said only two of those presented turned out to be actual meteorites.
It was one of the two.
“If you saw a rock like this on Earth and you picked it up, it shouldn’t be that heavy,” said Melbourne Museum geologist Bill Birch. announced Sydney Morning Herald.
Maryborough meteorite with a plate cut from the mass. (Museums Victoria)
researchers published a scientific article It tells about the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite, which they named Maryborough after the town near where it was found.
It weighs 17 kilograms (37.5 pounds), and after using a diamond saw to cut a small slice, researchers discovered that its composition is high in iron. H5 ordinary chondrite.
When opened, you can also see small crystallized droplets of metal minerals. skyscrapers.
Radial pyroxene chondrules formed in the Maryborough meteorite. (Birch et al., PRSV2019)
“Meteors provide the cheapest form of space exploration. “They take us back in time and provide clues to the age, formation and chemistry of our Solar System (including Earth).” said Henry.
“Some provide a glimpse into the depths of our planet. Some meteorites contain ‘stardust’ that is even older than our Solar System, showing us how stars form and evolve to form elements of the periodic table.”
“Other rare meteorites contain organic molecules such as amino acids, the building blocks of life.”
Although researchers don’t yet know where the meteorite came from and how long it might have been there. I’ve been on EarthHe has some guesses.
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Our Solar System was once a swirling pile of dust and chondrite rock.
Eventually gravity pulled most of this material into the planets, but what remained mostly collapsed into a huge mass. asteroid belt.
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“This particular meteorite is most likely asteroid arch between Anthem And Jupiter“It was pushed from there by the asteroids hitting each other and one day it crashed into Earth,” Henry told Channel 10 News.
Carbon dating indicates that the meteorite was on Earth between 100 and 1,000 years ago, and there were numerous meteor observations between 1889 and 1951 that may correspond to its history. arrival on our planet.
A plate cut from the Maryborough meteorite. (Birch et al., PRSV2019)
Researchers find Maryborough meteorite much rarer than goldwe make it so much more valuable for science.
One of 17 meteors ever discovered Recorded in Victoria, Australiaand is the second largest chondritic mass after a massive 55-kilogram specimen identified in 2003.
“This is the 17th meteorite found in Victoria alone, whereas thousands of gold nuggets have been found,” Henry told Channel 10 News.
“When you look at the chain of events, you can tell that the discovery of this was pretty astronomical.”
A barred olivine chondrule was formed in the Maryborough meteorite. (Birch et al., PRSV2019)
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It’s not even the first meteorite that took several years to bring to the museum. In one particularly surprising story As ScienceAlert reported in 2018, a space rock lasted 80 years, had two owners, and served as a doorstop before it was eventually revealed for what it really was.
Until recently, only a small fraction of meteorites that landed on Earth were tightly bound to their parent bodies in space; But three newly published papers in 2024 have given us intriguing origin stories for more than 90 percent of today’s meteorites.
Now is probably the best time to check your backyard for any particularly heavy and hard-to-break rocks; You may be sitting on a metaphorical gold mine.
The study was published on: Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria.
An earlier version of this article was published in July 2019.
