In 2015, David Hole was prospecting.
He was using a metal detector and found a heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay.
He took it home and tried to open it, thinking that it was a gold Nugget inside the rock, which is located in the Goldfields region of Australia.
Hole tried a variety of tools to break open his find. Not even a sledgehammer could make a crack. He was trying to open a gold Nugget. It was a rare meteorite that he discovered years later.
"It had a sculpted look to it," Henry said.
"That's formed when they come through the atmosphere, they are melting on the outside, and the atmosphere sculpts them."
Hole was unable to open the rock, but still curious, he took it to the museum for identification.
Henry told Channel 10 News that he has looked at rocks that people think are meteorites.
Henry has worked at the museum for 37 years and says only two of the offerings have turned out to be real meteorites.
One of the two was this one.
The museum in the city of Melbourne.
"If you saw a rock like this, and you picked it up, it shouldn't be that heavy," Bill Birch, another Melbourne Museum geologist, told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2019.
The meteorite was named Maryborough after the town where it was found, after the researchers published a scientific paper about it.
It's a huge 17 kilograms (37.5 pounds), and after cutting off a small slice, they discovered it has a high percentage of iron.
The tiny droplets of metallic minerals are called chondrules.
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.
Some show a glimpse at the deep interior of our planet. Stars form and evolve to create elements of the periodic table in meteorites that are older than our Solar System.
The building blocks of life are contained in other rare meteorites.
Birch and her team wrote a paper on the topic, "PRSS, 2019."
The researchers don't know where the meteorite came from or how long it was on Earth, but they have some guesses.
Our Solar System used to be a pile of dust and chondrite rocks. The leftovers mostly ended up in a huge asteroid belt after gravity pulled a lot of this material together into planets.
Henry told Channel 10 News that the meteorite most likely comes out of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and that one day it will smash into Earth.
The carbon dating shows that the meteorite has been on Earth for between 100 and 1,000 years, and there have been a number of meteorites seen on our planet.
The researchers think that the Maryborough meteorite is more rare than gold. It's the second largest chondritic mass after a huge 55 kiloogram meteorite was identified in 2003 and it's one of only 17 meteorites ever recorded in the Australian state of Victoria.
Henry told Channel 10 News that there have been thousands of gold nuggets found.
It's quite, you might say, astronomical it being discovered at all.
It's not the first meteorite to take a few years to make it to a museum. A space rock that took 80 years, two owners, and a stint as a doorstop before finally being revealed for what it really was, was covered in a ScienceAlert story.
You might be sitting on a gold mine if you check your backyard for heavy and hard-to-break rocks now.
The study was published in a journal.
This article was published in July of 2019.
