Maryborough meteorite
Luck was on the side of Australian man David Hall, who discovered a rock that he had kept for several years, when he conducted an excavation in 2015 in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia, without knowing that it was priceless, as the rock was very heavy and tended to… It is red in color and settles in the soil.
Detecting the rock with a metal detector
According to the scientific magazine “Science Alert”, “David” discovered this rock using a metal detector, so he decided to take it to his home and tried everything to open it, and in the end he was sure that there was a solid block of gold inside. the rockHe used a rock saw, a grinder, and a drill, and doused his precious find with acid, but all of that was of no use in breaking any parts of it, because it was not a solid block of gold, but rather a rare meteorite.
Hall couldn’t open the rock, but he remained fascinated, so he took the nugget to the Melbourne Museum to identify it. “I’ve looked at a lot of rocks that people think are meteorites, but in reality, after… “37 years of working at the museum and examining thousands of rocks, I have only found two that turned out to be real meteorites, and this was one of the two.”
“If you saw a rock like this on the ground, and you picked it up, it shouldn’t be that heavy,” Melbourne Museum geologist Bill Birch explained to the Sydney Morning Herald. The researchers published a scientific paper describing the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite, and released It is named “Maryborough” after the town near where it was found.
The meteorite contains a high percentage of iron
This rock weighs about 17 kilograms (37.5 pounds), and after using a diamond saw to cut a small slice, the researchers discovered that its composition contains a high percentage of iron, making it an ordinary H5 chondrite. Once opened, you can also see small crystalline droplets of metallic minerals. Throughout, which are called chondrules.
Henry says: “Meteorites provide the cheapest form of space exploration. They transport us back in time and provide clues about the age, composition and chemistry of our solar system, including Earth. Other rare meteorites contain organic molecules such as amino acids, which are the basic building blocks of life.”
Although researchers don’t yet know where the meteorite came from or how long it spent on Earth, they do have some guesses. Our solar system was a pile of dust and chondrite rocks, but eventually gravity pulled out a lot of this material. Together to form planets, but the remains mostly ended up in a massive asteroid belt.
Henry told Channel 10 News: “This particular meteorite most likely comes out of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It was pushed out of there due to some asteroids colliding with each other, and then one day it collided with Earth.”
Carbon dating indicates that the meteorite was on Earth between 100 and 1,000 years ago, and there were a number of sightings of the meteorite between 1889 and 1951, which could correspond to its arrival on our planet, while researchers believe that the “Maryborough” meteorite is much rarer than gold, which makes it Even more valuable to science, it is one of only 17 meteorites ever recorded in the Australian state of Victoria, and is the second largest chondrite mass, after a massive 55-kilogram specimen identified in 2003.
“This is him,” Henry told Channel 10 News meteorite Only the seventeenth was found in Victoria, while thousands of gold nuggets were found, and given the chain of events, it can be said that it is astronomical that they were discovered at all.”
