Let’s go back to talking about lucky metal detectorists. In 2015, David Hole, armed with a metal detector, was exploring Australia’s Maryborough Regional Park when he discovered something out of the ordinary: a very heavy reddish rockresting on yellow clay.
Hoping to find a gold nugget within the stone, he used a rock saw, an angle grinder, a drill and some acid. However, he could do nothing against it the indestructibility of the pebbleperhaps because that large stone was not the container of a precious golden ball…
“It had this sculpted, grooved look”, he said, al Sydney Morning HeraldMelbourne Museum geologist Dermot Henry in 2019, describing what si it turned out to be a meteorite. “They form when they pass through the atmosphere, merge outside and the atmosphere sculpts them”. Unable to open the ‘rock’, but still intrigued, Hole took the nugget to the Melbourne Museum for identification.
Dr. Henry is not new to this kind of experience: “I’ve looked at a lot of rocks that people think are meteorites”, reported to Channel 10 News. In his long career of 37 years and thousands of rocks examined, Henry was able to confirm spatial identity of only two stones.
From official scientific statements, it would appear that David Hole has found a 4.6 billion year old meteorite (like the British one, discovered last year), weighing 17 kilograms. He was called Maryborough, since it was found near the city of the same name. After using a diamond saw to cut out a small sample, the researchers found that its composition had ahigh percentage of ironmaking it a regular chondrite H5.
“Meteorites provide there cheapest form of space exploration. They transport us back in time, providing clues about the age, formation and chemistry of our Solar System (including Earth),” Henry said.
[Museo di Melbourne]
