People keep rocks for years, hoping for gold. It turned out to be very valuable.

In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia.

Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, red rock resting on some yellow soil.

He took it home and tried his best to open it, convinced that there was a nugget of gold inside the rock – after all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Australian gold rush was at its height in the 19th century.

To make his discovery, Hole tried a rock saw, an angle grinder, a drill, and even dipped cheese in acid. However, even a sledgehammer couldn’t crack it. That was because he was trying so hard to open that there was no gold nugget.

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As he found out years later, it was a rare meteorite.

The video below summarizes:

“It looked sculpted, dimples,” said Dermot Henry, a geologist at the Melbourne Museum. Sydney Morning Herald In 2019.

“It’s formed when they come from the atmosphere; they melt out, and the atmosphere sculpts them.”

Unable to open the ‘rock’, but still curious, Hole took the nugget to the Melbourne Museum for identification.

“I’ve seen a lot of rocks that people think are meteorites,” Henry told Channel 10 News.

In fact, after 37 years working at the museum and examining thousands of rocks, Henry said only two of the offerings are actual meteorites.

It was one of two.

“If you see a rock like this on Earth, and you pick it up, it shouldn’t be that heavy,” said Bill Burch, a geologist at the Melbourne Museum. Sydney Morning Herald.

The researchers published a scientific paper describing the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite, which they called Maryborough after the nearby town where it was found.

It weighs a whopping 17 kilograms (37.5 pounds), and after using a diamond saw to cut a small piece, the researchers discovered that it had a high percentage of iron in its composition, making it an H5 ordinary chondrite.

Once opened, you can also see tiny crystallized droplets of metallic minerals throughout it, called chondrules.

“Meteorites provide the cheapest form of space exploration. They send us back in time, giving us clues about the age, formation and chemistry of our solar system (including Earth),” Henry said.

“Some offer a glimpse into the deep interior of our planet. Some meteorites contain ‘stardust’ older than our solar system, showing us how stars form and create the 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.

Our solar system was once a pile of dust and chondrite rock.

Eventually gravity pulled much of this material together into the planets, but the remnants mostly ended up in the massive asteroid belt.

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“This particular meteorite probably came out of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it got kicked out of there by some asteroids hitting each other, then one day it hit Earth,” Henry told Channel 10 News.

Carbon dating suggests the meteorite has been on Earth for between 100 and 1,000 years, and there have been several meteor sightings between 1889 and 1951 that coincide with its arrival on our planet.

Researchers argue that the Maryborough meteorite is rarer than gold, making it more valuable to science.

It is only one of 17 meteorite bodies recorded in the Australian state of Victoria, and is the second largest chondritic body after the massive 55-kilogram specimen identified in 2003.

“This is only the 17th meteorite found in Victoria, while thousands of gold nuggets have been found there,” Henry told Channel 10 News.

“Looking at the chain of events, it’s quite, you might say, astronomically it’s been discovered.”

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It’s also not the first meteorite to take years to reach a museum. Especially in an amazing story As ScienceAlert covered in 2018, a space rock took 80 years, two owners, and a time as a door before it was finally revealed for what it really was.

Until recently, only a tiny fraction of meteorites that landed on Earth were connected to their parent bodies in space—but in 2024, three newly published papers gave us the origin stories of more than 90 percent of meteorites today.

It’s probably a good time to check your backyard for especially heavy and hard-to-break rocks—you could be sitting on a metaphorical gold mine.

The study was published in 2015 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria.

An earlier version of this article was published in July 2019.

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