Years later, Hall discovered that the rock was a rare meteorite.
“I’ve looked at a lot of rocks that people think are meteorites,” said Dermot Henry, a geologist at the Melbourne Museum. In fact, after 37 years of working in the museum and examining thousands of rocks, it turns out that only two of the exhibits are real meteorites.
Melbourne Museum researchers published a scientific paper describing the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite, which they named Maryborough after the town near where it was found.
According to the “Science Alert” website, the meteorite weighs 17 kilograms. Although researchers don’t yet know where the meteor came from, they have some guesses. “This particular meteorite most likely came from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter,” Henry says.
According to the researchers, the Maryborough meteorite is much rarer than gold.