In 2015, David Hole was searching in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia.
Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay.
He took it home and tried his best to open it, sure enough there was a gold nugget inside the rock – after all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Australian gold rush peaked in the 19th century.
To unlock his find, Hole tried rock saw, angle grinder, drill, and even doused the thing in acid. However, not even a sledgehammer can make a crack. This is because what he was trying so hard to unlock was no gold nugget.
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As he found out years later, it was a rare meteorite.
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“It had this sculpted, dimpled look to it,” Melbourne Museum geologist Dermot Henry said. The Sydney Morning Herald in 2019.
“That’s formed when they come through the atmosphere; they’re melting on the outside, and the atmosphere has sculpted them.”
Unable to open the ‘rock’, but still intrigued, Hole took the nugget to the Melbourne Museum for identification.
Dermot Henry and Melbourne Museum geologist Bill Birch with the Maryborough meteorite. (Museums Victoria)
“I’ve looked at a lot of rocks that people think are meteorites,” Henry told Channel 10 News.
In fact, after 37 years of working at the museum and examining thousands of rocks, Henry said only two of the offerings have ever turned out to be real meteorites.
This was one of the two.
“If you saw a rock on Earth like this, and picked it up, it shouldn’t be that heavy,” explained Bill Birch, a geologist at the Melbourne Museum. The Sydney Morning Herald.
The Maryborough meteorite, with a slab cut from the mass. (Museums Victoria)
Researchers have published a scientific paper describing the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite, which they named Maryborough after the town near where it was found.
It weighs 17 kilograms (37.5 pounds), and after using a diamond saw to cut a small portion, the researchers discovered its composition had a high percentage of iron, making it an ordinary H5 chondrite.
Once it opens, you can also see the tiny crystallized drops of metallic minerals along it, called chondrules.
Radial pyroxene chondrule formed in the Maryborough meteorite. (Birch et al., PRSV2019)
“Meteorites provide the 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),” said Henry.
“Some provide a glimpse into the deep interior of our planet. In some meteorites, there is ‘stardust’ even older than our Solar System, showing us how stars form and evolve to create elements of the periodic table.
“Other rare meteorites contain organic molecules such as amino acids; the building blocks of life.”
Although researchers still don’t know where the meteorite came from and how long it may have been on Earth, they have some guesses.
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Our Solar System was once a swirling pile of dust and chondrite rock.
Eventually gravity pulled most of this material together into planets, but the remains mostly ended up in a huge belt of asteroids.
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“This particular meteorite probably came out of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and was blown out of there by some asteroids smashing into each other, then one day it smashed into Earth,” Henry told Channel 10 News.
Carbon dating suggests that the meteorite has been on Earth for between 100 and 1,000 years, and there were a number of meteorite sightings between 1889 and 1951 that may correspond to its arrival on our planet.
Slab cut from the Maryborough meteorite. (Birch et al., PRSV2019)
Researchers argue that the Maryborough meteorite is much rarer than gold, making it far more valuable to science.
It is one of only 17 meteorites ever recorded in the Australian state of Victoria, and is the second largest chondritic mass, after a massive 55 kilogram specimen identified in 2003.
“This is only the 17th meteorite found in Victoria, while thousands of gold nuggets have been found,” Henry told Channel 10 News.
“When you look at the chain of events, it’s quite, you might say, astronomical that it’s being discovered at all.”
Barrad Olivine chondrule formed in the Maryborough meteorite. (Birch et al., PRSV2019)
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It is not even the first meteorite that takes a few years to reach a museum. In a particularly amazing story ScienceAlert covered in 2018, one space rock took 80 years, two owners, and a stint as a doorstop before it was finally revealed for what it really was.
Until recently, only a small fraction of the meteorites that land on Earth were firmly linked back to their parent body in space – but in 2024, three newly published papers gave us compelling origin stories for more than 90 percent of meteorites today.
Now is probably as good a time as any to check your yard for particularly heavy, hard-to-break rocks — you could be sitting on a metaphorical gold mine.
The study was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria.
An earlier version of this article was published in July 2019.