“Rare Meteorite Found in Australia: Melbourne Museum Experts Identify Its True Identity as 4.6 Billion-Year-Old Space Object”

Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – David Hole didn’t expect his findings to be bigger than he thought. The mysterious stone he mistook for gold turns out to be a rare meteorite.

The stone was discovered in Maryborough Regional Park, near Melbourne, Australia, in 2015. Hole tried to open the rock with a rock saw, grinder, drill, to acid, and couldn’t destroy it.

After being taken to the Melbourne Museum and identified by experts, the stone’s true identity was finally discovered. “It looks like it’s sculpted with dimples. It takes shape as it passes through the atmosphere, they melt on the outside and the atmosphere sculpts it,” Melbourne Museum geologist Dermot Henry told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2019, quoted from Science Alert, Monday (15/5/2023).

The researchers in their paper wrote that the meteorite named Maryborough was identified as 4.6 billion years old. The weight of the space object reaches 17 kilograms.

The meteorite was chopped into small pieces of high percentage iron to make it the H5 ordinary chondrite. Once opened, there are tiny crystallized drops of metallic minerals known as chondrules.

“Some provide glimpses of our planet. A number of meteorites, there is ‘stardust’ which is even older than our Solar System how stars form and evolve to create elements of the periodic table,” he explained.

“Other rare meteorites contain organic molecules such as amino acids; the building blocks of life”.

Even so, researchers have not been able to determine the origin of the meteorite. In addition, there is no information since when the stone was on Earth.

But allegedly, Maryborough comes from the asteroid belt which lies between Mars and Jupiter. According to Henry, meteorites came out of there after the collision.

“This particular meteorite probably came out of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and had been pushed out of there by several asteroids that collided with each other and then one day hit Earth,” Henry explained.

Meteorites are also thought to have been on Earth from 100 to 1,000 years. The information comes from carbon dating. Science Alert attributed this information to the presence of a meteorite between 1889 and 1951 on Earth.