Jakarta –
In 2015, David Hole searched for precious minerals in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. Armed with a metal detector, he finds something unusual, a very heavy reddish stone set in yellow clay.
He took some of the stones home and tried various ways to open them. Hole believes there is gold in the stone. This belief is not without reason. Maryborough is located in the Goldfields region, a popular place of gold production in Australia that peaked in the 19th century.
To unlock his discovery, Hole tried a rock saw, an angle grinder, a drill, and even doused it in acid. However, not even a sledgehammer could create an opening. She kept it for years, until finally she learned that the stone contained no gold.
Disappointed? On the contrary, she was happier. Quoted from Scientific alarmon Friday (11/25/2022) it was discovered that the stone he had kept was a rare meteorite much more valuable than gold.
“The rock has a sculpted, dimpled appearance,” Museum of Melbourne geologist Dermot Henry told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2019.
“Rocks form as they pass through the atmosphere. They melt out and the atmosphere sculpts them,” he explains.
Unable to split the rock and overcome with curiosity, Hole took the boulder to the Melbourne Museum for identification.
“I’ve seen a lot of rocks that people think are meteorites,” Henry said. He said only two of the many boulders Hole delivered turned out to be real meteorites.
“If you look at a rock on Earth like this and pick it up, it shouldn’t be that heavy,” said Melbourne Museum geologist Bill Birch.
The researchers later published a scientific paper describing the 4.6-billion-year-old meteorite, which they named Maryborough, after the town where the rock was found.
The stone weighed up to 17 kilograms, and after using a diamond saw to cut it, the researchers found that its composition had a high percentage of iron content, making it the common H5 chondrite.
When opened, it reveals tiny droplets of metallic minerals crystallized throughout, called chondrules.
“Studying meteorites is the cheapest form of space exploration. They take us back in time, providing clues about the age, formation and chemistry of our Solar System, including Earth,” Henry said.
Some rocks from space, he explained, provide a glimpse of our planet’s interior. In some meteorites there is a “stardust” even older than our Solar System, which shows us how stars formed and evolved to create the elements of the periodic table.
“Other rare meteorites contain organic molecules such as amino acids which are the building blocks of early life on a planet,” he added.
Origin of the stone
While researchers don’t yet know where the meteorite came from and how long it has been on Earth, they do have some guesses.
Our Solar System was once a swirling pile of chondrite rock and dust. Eventually, gravity pulled much of this material into the planets, but most of the remnant ended up in the massive asteroid belt.
“This particular meteorite most likely came out of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and was pushed out of there by several asteroids colliding with each other, then one day it crashed into Earth,” Henry said.
Carbon dating shows that the meteorite was on Earth for 100 to 1,000 years, and there were a number of meteor sightings between 1889 and 1951 that can be linked to its arrival on our planet.
Researchers argue that the Maryborough meteorite is much rarer than gold, making it much more valuable to science. It is one of 17 meteorites ever recorded in the Australian state of Victoria, and is the second largest chondritic mass, following the discovery of a large 55-kilogram specimen identified in 2003.
“This is the 17th meteorite found in Victoria, while there are thousands of gold nuggets found,” Henry said.
It’s also not the first meteorite to take years to reach museums. In another 2018 story, it took a space rock 80 years to be identified and reported to a museum by its owner.
Watch a video “5 meteor shower phenomena that will happen in November 2022“
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(rns/fay)
