Unexpectedly, the wait that a man had hoped for on this giant boulder ended in a sweet ending. Starting in 2015, David Hole was looking for prospects at Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia.
Armed with a metal detector, he finds something unusual. There is a very heavy reddish stone that lies in the yellow clay.
He took it home and tried everything possible to open it because he was sure that there was a nugget of gold in the stone. What's more, Maryborough is in the famous Goldfields area of the 19th century.
To dismantle his findings, Hole tried rock saws, angle grinders, drills, and even acidified them. However, not even a sledgehammer could make a crack in the rock.
Why is it so difficult? That was because what he was trying to hard open was not a lump of gold. It was years later that he found out what it was. As it turned out, it was a rare meteorite.
"It (the meteorites) have a sculpted, dimpled appearance, formed as they passed through the atmosphere, they melted outside, and the atmosphere sculpted them," Melbourne museum geologist Dermot Henry told The Sydney Morning Herald.
So, when you find a stone like that, it may not be an ordinary stone. Chances are, the rock doesn't come from our planet.
"If you look at rock on Earth like this, and you pick it up, it shouldn't be as heavy as it looks," another Melbourne Museum geologist, Bill Birch, told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2019.
Researchers have finally published a scientific paper describing the 4.6 billion year old meteorite which they call Maryborough.
This stone is very large weighing 17 kg, and after using a diamond saw to cut small wedges, they found its composition to have a high percentage of iron. Once opened, researchers can also see tiny crystal droplets of metallic minerals all over it, called chondrules.
While researchers don't yet know where the meteorite came from and how long it's been on Earth, they do have some guesses.
Our Solar System was once a rotating pile of dust and chondrite rock. Eventually gravity pulled much of this material together to form planets, but most of the rest ended up in the large asteroid belt.
"This particular meteorite most likely came out of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and had been pushed out of there by several asteroids hitting each other, then one day it hit Earth," Henry told Channel 10 News.
Carbon dating shows the meteorite has been on Earth for between 100 and 1,000 years. Researchers argue that the Maryborough meteorite is much rarer than gold, and thus far more valuable scientifically.
It is one of 17 meteorites ever recorded in the Australian state of Victoria, and is the second largest chondritic mass, after the large 55 kg specimen identified in 2003. The study is published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria.