He kept a rock thinking it was gold...and discovered the surprise years later! - Arabic DW

24.11.2023

An Australian man discovered a very heavy, strange-looking rock. He thought it contained gold, so he kept it for several years, trying to break it and extract what was inside it. All his attempts failed until he presented it to geologists, which was a surprise.

In 2015, David Hall was excavating in Maryborough Provincial Park near Melbourne, Australia. Through the metal detector he was carrying, he found something out of the ordinary: a reddish rock resting on some yellow clay.

Take a hole What he found He went home and tried to break it, and he was certain that inside it was a solid block of gold, because the Maryborough area is located in the so-called gold fields, an area that witnessed huge discoveries of Australian gold in the 19th century.

Hall attempted to split open the large chamber using a rock saw and drill, even dousing it in acid. However, not even a heavy hammer could make a crack in it, because what he was trying so hard to open was not a solid block of gold! With his repeated frustrations and failure to open the “rock,” Hall decided to take it to the Melbourne Museum to identify it.

Years later, the man discovered that what he had was much more valuable than gold…it wasAn extremely rare meteorite.

Dermot Henry, a geologist at the Melbourne Museum, said: “It had this strange appearance that did not resemble any rock, as it was formed when it crossed the atmosphere and was exposed to this enormous amount of heat and friction, which sculpted it, so it melted from the outside and sealed what was inside,” according to what he told the newspaper. Sydney Morning Herald.

The geologist points out that after 37 years of working in museums and examining thousands of rocks, he discovered that only two of the rocks presented to him were real meteorites, including the Hall meteorite, while Bill Birch, a geologist at the Melbourne Museum, confirmed that there is no rock on Earth that is this heavy in comparison. Its small size.

The researchers published Scientific paper in Journal of the “Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria” Describes a meteorite estimated to be 4.6 billion years old, which they named Maryborough after the town near Where to find it.

The rare meteorite weighs 17 kilograms, and after using a diamond saw to cut a small slice, the researchers discovered that its composition contains a high percentage of iron. Once the meteorite was opened, the scientists noticed small crystalline droplets of various minerals spread throughout it.

Hanwi says that meteorites “provide the cheapest form of space exploration as they take us back millions of years and provide evidence of the age and composition of our solar system (including Earth), noting that in some meteorites, there is “star dust” older than our solar system, which shows us “How stars form and evolve. Other rare meteorites also contain organic molecules such as amino acids that are the 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. “This particular meteorite probably came out of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it was pushed out of there by some asteroids colliding with each other, and it eventually reached Earth,” Henry says.

Carbon dating suggests that the meteorite was on Earth between 100 and 1,000 years ago, as there were a number of meteorite sightings between 1889 and 1951 that could correspond to its arrival on our planet.

Researchers believe that the Maryborough meteorite is much rarer than gold, which makes it more valuable to science, as it is one of only 17 meteorites ever recorded in the Australian state of Victoria over a period of more than a hundred years, according to what was published by the “Science Alert” website.

Imad Hassan