Nationalgeographic.co.id—In 2015, David Hole was looking for prospects at Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. Armed with a metal detector, he discovers something unusual – stone very heavy redness that lies in yellow clay.
He brought it home and tried everything to split stone that, sure that there is a lump gold inside stone that – after all, Maryborough is in Goldfields territory, where the mines are gold Australia reached its peak in the 19th century.
To dismantle his findings, Hole tries a saw stone, angle grinder, drill, even acid-treating it. However, not even a sledgehammer could make a gap. That’s because what he’s trying to hard open isn’t a lump gold as he had thought for years. It was a rare meteorite.
“It had a sculpted, dimpled look,” Melbourne museum geologist Dermot Henry told The Sydney Morning Herald.
“It forms when they pass through the atmosphere, they melt outside, and the atmosphere sculpts them.”
Because it can’t open’stone‘, his curiosity piqued, Hole took the boulder to the Melbourne Museum for identification.
“I have seen a lot stone which people think is a meteorite, “Henry told Channel 10 News.
In fact, after 37 years of working in museums and examining thousands of stone, Henry explains that only two of the offerings turned out to be actually meteorites.
This is one of them.
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“If you see stone on Earth like this, and you pick it up, it shouldn’t be that heavy,” said another Melbourne Museum geologist, Bill Birch, as quoted by The Sydney Morning Herald in 2019.
Researchers published a scientific paper describing a 4.6 billion year old meteorite, which they called Maryborough after the name of a nearby town. stone it was found.
Stone it weighed 17 kilograms (37.5 pounds), and after using a diamond saw to cut small wedges, they found the composition had a high percentage of iron, making it the common chondrite of H5.
Once opened, they can also see tiny grains of metallic minerals that crystallize throughout, the chondrules.
“Meteorites provide 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 provide a glimpse of the interior of our planet. In some meteorites, there is ‘star dust’ even older than our Solar System, which shows us how stars formed and evolved to create the elements of the periodic table.
“organic molecules such as amino acids; the building blocks of life.”
Although researchers don’t yet know where the meteorite came from and how long it has been on Earth, they have some guesses.
Our Solar System was once a pile of dust and stone rotating chondrite. eventually gravity pulls this material into a planet, but the remains stone most end up in larger asteroids.
“This particular meteorite is most likely to have come out of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it’s been elbowed out of there by several asteroids crashing into each other, then one day crashing into Earth,” Henry said.
Carbon dating shows the meteorite has been on Earth for between 100 and 1,000 years, and there have been a number of sightings meteor between 1889 and 1951 which could correspond to its arrival on our planet.
Researchers think the Maryborough meteorite is much rarer than gold. It’s one of only 17 meteorites ever recorded in the Australian state of Victoria, and it’s the second largest est chondritic mass, after a large 55 kilogram specimen identified in 2003.
“This is only the 17th meteorite found in Victoria, while there are thousands of nuggets gold found,” said Henry
“Looking at the chain of events, you could say, the astronomical was not found at all.”
It’s not even the first meteorite to take several years to reach the museum. In a very amazing story that was covered earlier in 2018, one stone space took 80 years, two owners, and a stint as a doorstop before it was finally revealed what it really was.
Now might be a good time to check your backyard for stone very heavy and difficult to break – you may be sitting in a mine gold metaphorical.
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