A man named David Hole was on a quest in Maryborough Regional Park, near Melbourne, Australia, in 2015. While walking around with his metal detector in hand, he discovered something unusual: Inside the yellow clay stood a very heavy, reddish stone.
He took this stone home and tried everything to break it, making sure that there was a gold nugget in the stone. After all, Maryborough was located in the Goldfields region, at the height of Australia’s gold rush in the 19th century.
He tried a rock saw, angle grinder, drill to break the hole finding. He even tried using acid. But he couldn’t even crack it. This was because what he had worked so hard to unlock was already a golden meteorite itself.
Although Hole was unable to open the “stone”, he took it to the Melbourne Museum because he was intrigued.
“Stone had a chipped, pitted appearance,” Melbourne Museum geologist Dermot Henry told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2019. “They form when they pass through the atmosphere, their outer parts melt and the atmosphere shapes them.”
“I’ve studied many rocks that people think are meteorites,” Henry told Channel 10 News. “In fact, only two of the thousands of rocks I’ve studied in my 37 years working at the museum were real meteorites.” This stone was one of those two.
Melbourne Museum geologist Bill Birch told The Sydney Morning Herald: “A stone of this size in the world wouldn’t be that heavy.”
4.6-year-old meteorite: Maryborough
Researchers have published a scientific paper on the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite, named after the nearby town of Maryborough.
This stone weighed 17 kilograms, and after using a diamond saw to cut a small slice, the researchers found that its composition contained a high percentage of iron and was an H5 ordinary chondrite. After opening, small droplets of crystalline metallic minerals called chondrules were also visible.
“Meteorites provide the cheapest form of space exploration. They take us back in time, provide clues about the age, formation and chemistry of our Solar System (including Earth),” he said. “Some provide a glimpse into the depths of our planet. Some meteorites have ‘stardust’ even older than our Solar System, showing how stars formed and evolved to form elements of the periodic table. Other rare meteorites contain organic molecules such as amino acids, which are the building blocks of life.”
While researchers don’t yet know where the meteorite came from and how long it may have been on Earth, they are making some guesses.
It has been determined that our Solar System was once a swirling mound of dust and chondrite rock. Eventually, gravity pulled most of this material together to the planets, but the remnants mostly remained, forming a large asteroid belt.
“This particular meteorite is most likely coming out of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and was pushed out by some asteroids colliding with each other, then slammed into Earth one day,” Henry told Channel 10 News.
Carbon dating shows that the meteorite was on Earth for between 100 and 1,000 years, and there were a number of meteor observations between 1889 and 1951 that may correspond 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 recorded so far in Victoria, Australia, and the second largest chondritic mass after a massive 55 kilogram specimen identified in 2003.
“This is just the 17th meteorite found in Victoria. But it’s worth thousands of gold bars,” Henry said in an interview with Channel 10 News. “From the chain of events, you can tell the chances of being discovered are pretty astronomical.”
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