TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – Australian treasure hunter David Hole finds stone which looked dirty at first thought it had gold nuggets in it. However, because the stone was so hard, he kept it for years on a shelf in his house.
The stone was discovered in 2015 with his metal detector while exploring clay in the Maryborough area, near Melbourne, which was famous for being Australia’s gold-bearing site in the nineteenth century. Only a few years later an expert told him that the stone was actually meteorit 4.6 billion years old which is very rare.
“I kept the dirty stone on my shelf for years without knowing what it was, and I considered it worthless. I don’t believe what it really is, “Hole told The Sydney Morning Herald, Wednesday, November 24, 2021.
For member said that it was only a handful of space rocks that fell in the region in the last century. The stone weighs 17 kilograms, and looks metallic with rusty wavy surfaces all over.
According to Hole, the rock was so hard that even rock saws, drills, grinders, and including a sledgehammer all bounced off the rock’s surface. He also tried dousing it with acid, but still failed to make a scratch. “What the hell,” he said not expecting how hard the rock was.
The excavated rock then collected dust for four years until he took it for examination at the Melbourne Museum. Only then did experts tell him that the rock contained something far rarer than gold: “metallic droplets from the beginning of the solar system.”
The rock was created from a cloud of debris swirling around the newborn sun, which also formed the planets, including Earth, then spent 4.6 billion years in orbit before hitting Australian soil some time in the last 1,000 years.
Geologist Dermot Henry said in 37 years of working in the area, he had only found two genuine meteorites. According to Henry, the rock discovered by Hole, is the 17th meteorite found in Victoria, while thousands of gold nuggets have been found. “Looking at the chain of events, you can say that the meteorite has just been discovered at all,” said Henry.
Henry also continued that the rocks had a sculpted, dimpled appearance that formed as they passed through the atmosphere, then melted outside, and the atmosphere sculpted them. “The rock takes us back in time, providing clues about the age, formation, and chemistry of our solar system,” he said.
The researchers classify it as an ordinary chondrite meteorite H5, meaning it contains tiny crystalline droplets of metal formed by the lightning heating of dust clouds of the early solar system. It contains silicates, iron, nickel and magnesium, as well as small amounts of carbon and crystallized water.
It most likely formed in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and was thrown off course by the collision. Carbon dating analysis places his time on Earth between 100 and 1,000 years.
THE SUN | THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
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