Jakarta –
A man in Australia named David Hole found a stone that he thought contained gold, but it turned out that its contents were much more valuable than gold. So what is that chunk?
In 2015, David Hole was scouting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. Using a metal detector, he found a reddish stone located in yellow clay.
He took it home and tried to open it assuming there was a gold nugget inside. For your information, Maryborough is in the Goldfields area, where the Australian ‘gold rush’ reached its peak in the 19th century.
Hole has tried opening the rock with rock saws, angle grinders, drills, and even dousing the thing in acid. However, no one could penetrate the object because what was inside was not gold. Several years later, he found out that it was a rare meteorite.
“It has a sculpted, dimpled appearance,” Melbourne Museum geologist Dermot Henry told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2019, quoted from Science Alert, Tuesday (28/11/2023).
“They form when they pass through the atmosphere, they melt on the outside, and the atmosphere forms them,” he continued.
Hole couldn’t open the stone, so he was still curious and took the stone to the Melbourne Museum to be identified.
“I’ve seen a lot of rocks that people think are meteorites,” Henry told Channel 10 News.
After 37 years of working at the museum and examining hundreds of rocks, Henry says only two of the hundreds of rocks are genuine meteorites. The stone that Hole found was one of the two meteorites. Although researchers don’t yet know where the meteorite came from, they already have some guesses.
“This 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, and then one day hit Earth,” Henry told Channel 10 News.
Carbon dating shows the meteorite was on Earth between 100 and 1,000 years ago, and there were a number of meteor sightings between 1889 and 1951 that may be related to the meteorite’s arrival on Earth.
Researchers think the Maryborough meteorite is a much rarer item than gold, making it much more valuable to science. This meteorite is one of 17 meteorites ever recorded in Victoria, Australia.
“This is only the 17th meteorite found in Victoria, even though thousands of gold nuggets have been found,” Henry told Channel 10 News.
(fdl/fdl)
2023-11-28 07:41:40
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