(Museums Victoria) Posted on 11/30/2021 6:33:43 AM PST by Red Badger
(Museums Victoria)
In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia.
Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay.
He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside the rock – after all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Australian gold rush peaked in the 19th century.
To break open his find, Hole tried a rock saw, an angle grinder, a drill, even dousing the thing in acid. However, not even a sledgehammer could make a crack. That's because what he was trying so hard to open was no gold nugget. As he found out years later, it was a rare meteorite.
"It had this sculpted, dimpled look to it," Melbourne museum geologist Dermot Henry told The Sydney Morning Herald.
"That's formed when they come through the atmosphere, they are melting on the outside, and the atmosphere sculpts them."
Unable to open the 'rock', but still intrigued, Hole took the nugget to the Melbourne Museum for identification.
"I've looked at a lot of rocks that people think are meteorites," Henry told Channel 10 News.
In fact, after 37 years of working at the museum and examining thousands of rocks, Henry explains only two of the offerings have ever turned out to be real meteorites.
This was one of the two.
(Melbourne Museum)
"If you saw a rock on Earth like this, and you picked it up, it shouldn't be that heavy," another Melbourne Museum geologist, Bill Birch, told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2019.
The researchers published a scientific paper describing the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite, which they've called Maryborough after the town near where it was found.
It's a huge 17 kilograms (37.5 pounds), and after using a diamond saw to cut off a small slice, they discovered its composition has a high percentage of iron, making it a H5 ordinary chondrite.
Once open, you can also see the tiny crystallized droplets of metallic minerals throughout it, called chondrules.
"Meteorites provide the cheapest form of space exploration. They transport us back in time, providing clues to the age, formation and chemistry of our Solar System (including Earth)," said Henry.
"Some provide a glimpse at the deep interior of our planet. In some meteorites, there is 'stardust' even older than our Solar System, which shows us how stars form and evolve to create elements of the periodic table.
"Other rare meteorites contain organic molecules such as amino acids; the building blocks of life."
(Birch et al., PRSV, 2019)
Although the researchers don't yet know where the meteorite came from and how long it may have been on Earth, they do have some guesses.
Our Solar System was once a spinning pile of dust and chondrite rocks. Eventually gravity pulled a lot of this material together into planets, but the leftovers mostly ended up in a huge asteroid belt.
"This particular meteorite most probably comes out of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it's been nudged out of there by some asteroids smashing into each other, then one day it smashes into Earth," Henry told Channel 10 News.
Carbon dating suggests the meteorite has been on Earth between 100 and 1,000 years, and there's been a number of meteor sightings between 1889 and 1951 that could correspond to its arrival on our planet.
The researchers argue that the Maryborough meteorite is much rarer than gold, making it far more valuable to science. It's one of only 17 meteorites ever recorded in the Australian state of Victoria, and it's the second largest chondritic mass, after a huge 55-kilogram specimen identified in 2003.
"This is only the 17th meteorite found in Victoria, whereas there's been thousands of gold nuggets found," Henry told Channel 10 News.
"Looking at the chain of events, it's quite, you might say, astronomical it being discovered at all."
It's not even the first meteorite to take a few years to make it to a museum. In a particularly amazing story ScienceAlert covered in 2018, one space rock took 80 years, two owners, and a stint as a doorstop before finally being revealed for what it truly was.
Now is probably as good a time as any to check your backyard for particularly heavy and hard-to-break rocks – you might be sitting on a metaphorical gold mine.
The study was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria.
A version of this article was originally published in July 2019.
We should find the formula for making this material and make our homes and building materials out of it!..............
David Hole found the meteorite, but now we return you to our program of dance music.
https://www.google.com/search?q=dave+hole
From the excerpt:
It's a huge 17 kilograms (37.5 pounds)
37.5 lbs X 16 oz./lb = 600 oz.
Regards,
I thought I read in kg.
Is my math right otherwise? I did it in my head.
We know a guy who works for a jewelry maker. He fashions meteorites into expensive wedding rings. Very pretty stuff.
Antiques Roadshow says that it would be worth a whole lot more if it didn’t have that slice taken out of it…
When dealing with precious metals, ounces are ‘Troy’ ounces and not ‘Avoirdupois’ ounces.
Troy ounces are slightly heavier than the Avdp type.
1 Troy ounce = 31.1034768 grams
1 Avdp ounce = 28.349523125 grams
This would make a nice brooch.....................
gold is measured in troy ounces of which there are 12 to a pound i believe.
So what did they pay him for his find?
Looks like ZERO!
17 kg are 37.5 pounds (avoirdupois). My original calculation thus stands. These cannot be troy pounds.
Regards,
I didn’t have my little red wagon with me at the time. 🙂
True, I was not trying to correct you, just making a statement as to usual business practice that the writer did not explain.............
Geez Fred, they keep talking your goodies from your back yard!
I wondered if that picture would show up. A tip o tha hat to ya!
A good way to test the rock. If it crushes the wagon, it’s a meteorite.
Alas the one I found had a peanut in the end of it. I was able to trade the peanut to a tree rat for a walnut...
Looks like a “rock” to me. I already have too many of those. (rocks).
Better start checking your rocks with a magnet and hammer.....................
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