After unsuccessfully trying to open his treasure, David Hole took the object to a museum, where experts concluded that it came from space. Amateur treasure hunter David Hole, armed with his metal detector, headed to Maryborough Regional Park (Australia) with the aim of finding something of great value.
However, what he found on that day in 2015 was something much more spectacular: a very heavy reddish stone resting on yellow clay. You may be interested in: The deaths of two 15- and 16-year-old girls in a park in the centre of Jaén are being investigated as a ‘possible suicide’.
Hole took his new treasure home with great anticipation, believing that what he would find inside was gold. Maryborough, the town where he lived and where he found the rock, had been a very important region during the 19th century gold rush in Australia. The treasure hunter used various techniques to try to open it, without success: a rock saw, an angle grinder, a drill and even acid, which he sprayed on the material in the hope of gaining access to its interior. Realising that nothing could open it, Hole took his new treasure to the Melbourne Museum (part of Museums Victoria) for experts to identify. There, geologists Bill Birch and Dermot Henry suspected almost immediately that what the Maryborough resident might have in his hands was a meteorite. Their investigations concluded that this was indeed the case.
A 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite
‘Meteorites offer the most economical form of space exploration,’ said Dermot Henry, Director of Science at the Victoria Museum, in 2019, when the nature of this discovery became known. ‘They transport us back in time, providing clues about the age, formation and chemical composition of our Solar System (including Earth).’ Inside them, we can find stardust, elements from the periodic table or organic molecules, such as amino acids, so their discovery and analysis provide many clues about outer space.
Australian researchers, in a scientific article published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, pointed out that the 17-kilogram rock, which they named the Maryborough meteorite after the region where it was found, may have formed 4.6 billion years ago. Experts at Museums Victoria said that ‘it is not known for certain when it fell to Earth,’ although ‘carbon-14 tests suggest it was between 100 and 1,000 years ago.’ In fact, given the multiple sightings that occurred in this area between 1889 and 1951, ‘it is possible that the Mayborough meteorite entered our atmosphere relatively recently.’
To observe what was inside, the researchers used a diamond saw to cut off a small piece. Analyses concluded that it was a common H5 chondrite: “This means that this meteorite contains small crystallised droplets (chondrules), formed by the sudden heating of dust clouds in the early solar system. It most likely formed in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.” The discovery was widely celebrated by the region’s scientific community because, although the museum receives many rocks suspected of being meteorites, only a very small percentage are confirmed as such. ‘When we consider all the events that this piece of rock has gone through since its formation 4.6 billion years ago, it is truly incredible that we have the opportunity to hold it and study it today,’ said Bill Birch, emeritus curator of geosciences at the Victoria Museum and lead author of the study, who was thrilled with the discovery.
