David Hole was prospecting in Australia in 2015.
He used a metal detector to find a heavy, reddish rock in some yellow clay.
He took it home and tried everything he could to open it, but he couldn't find a gold Nugget inside the rock.
Hole tried a lot of things to break open his find. A sledgehammer wouldn't make a crack. He was trying to open something that wasn't a gold Nugget.
He discovered that it was a rare meteorite.
It had a sculpted look to it, according to a museum scientist.
When they come through the atmosphere, they melt on the outside, and the atmosphere sculpts them.
Hole was unable to open the 'rock' but still wanted to look at it.
Henry said that a lot of the rocks people think are meteorites are his.
Henry has worked at the museum for 37 years and said only two of the offerings have turned out to be real meteorites.
One of the two was this.
A slab from the meteorite. There is a museum in the city.
"If you saw a rock on Earth like this, and you picked it up, it shouldn't be that heavy," said Bill Birch, a museum scientist.
The meteorite, which was 4.5 billion years old, was described in a scientific paper by the researchers.
After cutting off a small slice with a diamond saw, the researchers discovered its composition had a high percentage of iron, making it a H5 ordinarychondrite.
You can see the tiny droplets of metallic minerals when it's open.
The cheapest form of space exploration is provided by meteorites." Henry said that they give clues to the age, formation, and chemistry of our Solar System.
There is a glimpse at the deep inside of our planet. Stars form and evolve to create elements of the periodic table in meteorites.
The building blocks of life are contained in other rare meteorites.
There is a piece of meteorite. Birch and her co-conspirators wrote the book, "PrsV."
The researchers have some guesses as to where the meteorite came from and how long it was on Earth.
Our solar system used to be a pile of dust and rocks. The leftovers of this material ended up in an asteroid belt.
Henry told Channel 10 News that the meteorite most likely came out of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
According to carbon dating, the meteorite has been on Earth for between 100 and 1000 years, and there have been a number of meteorites seen on our planet in the past.
The researchers say that the Maryborough meteorite is more valuable to science than gold. It's one of only 17 meteorites ever recorded in the Australian state of Victoria and it's the second largest chondritic mass.
There have been thousands of gold nuggets found, but this is the 17th meteorite found in Victoria.
It's quite, you might say, amazing it being discovered at all.
The first meteorite to make it to a museum took a few years. One space rock took 80 years, two owners, and a stint as a doorstop before finally being revealed for what it really was, and it was covered in a Science Alert.
You might be sitting on a gold mine if you don't check your backyard for heavy and hard to break rocks now.
The study was published in a peer reviewed journal.
The original article was published in July of 2019.
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