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, reddish stone resting in some yellow clay.
He took it home and tried everything to open it, certain that there was a nugget of gold inside the rock – after all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Australian gold rush reached its peak in the 19th century.
To crack his discovery, Hole tried a saw, an angle grinder, a drill, and even doused the thing in acid. However, not even a sledgehammer could make a crack. That’s because what he was trying so hard to open wasn’t a 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,” Melbourne Museum geologist Dermot Henry said Sydney Morning Herald in 2019.
“This forms when they go through the atmosphere; they melt outward, and the atmosphere sculpts them.”
Unable to open the “rock”, but still intrigued, Hole took the nugget to the Melbourne Museum for identification.
Dermot Henry and geologist Bill Birch from the Melbourne Museum 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 working at the museum and examining thousands of rocks, Henry said only two of the offerings have ever been found 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,” Melbourne Museum geologist Bill Birch explained. 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 nearby town where it was found.
It weighs 17 kilograms (37.5 pounds), and after using a diamond saw to cut a small slice, the researchers found that its composition had a high percentage of iron, making it a typical H5 chondrite.
Once opened, you can also see the tiny crystallized drops of metallic minerals along it, called chondrules.
The radial pyroxene chondrule formed in the Maryborough meteorite. (Birch et al., PSV2019)
“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),” Henry said.
“Some provide a glimpse into our planet’s deep interior. 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 don’t yet know where the meteorite came from or how long it may have been on Earth, they have some guesses.
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Our solar system was once a pile of dust and chondrite rocks.
Eventually, gravity pulled a lot of this material into the planets, but the debris mostly ended up in a giant asteroid belt.
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“Most likely, this particular meteorite is coming out of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it was kicked out of there by some asteroids colliding with each other, and then one day it hits Earth,” Henry told Channel 10 News.
Carbon dating suggests the meteorite has been on Earth for between 100 and 1,000 years, and there were a number of meteor sightings between 1889 and 1951 that could correspond with its arrival on our planet.
A slab cut from the Maryborough meteorite. (Birch et al., PSV2019)
Researchers say the Maryborough meteorite is much rarer than gold, making it much more valuable to science.
It is one of 17 meteorites ever recorded in the Australian state of Victoria and is the second largest chondritic mass after a huge 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.
“Looking at the chain of events, you could say it’s pretty astronomical to be discovered.”
The barred olivine chondrule formed in the Maryborough meteorite. (Birch et al., PSV2019)
Related: There’s something special about meteors colliding with Earth
It’s not even the first meteorite to take a few years to reach a museum. In a particularly amazing story ScienceAlert covered in 2018, a space rock lasted 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 meteorites that land on Earth were closely related to their parent body in space—but in 2024, three newly published papers gave us compelling stories about the origin of more than 90 percent of today’s meteorites.
Now is probably as good a time as any to check your backyard for particularly heavy, hard-to-break rocks—you might just be 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.