Man Hoards 'Gold Nugget' for 17 Years — Then Experts Reveal It's a 4.6-Billion-Year-Old Meteorite

For 17 long years, David Hole hoarded a rock in his home and imagined that it contained a gold nugget. When he couldn’t figure out a way to cut up the rock for investigation, he took it to two eminent geologists at the Museums Victoria. As it turned out, the ordinary-looking rock proved to be valuable beyond Hole’s wildest imagination. It was not just an ordinary rock, but a fragment that had landed here in Australia after a cosmic trip dating back to the dawn of the solar system, as they documented in a scientific paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria.

The dramatic episode unrolled in May 2015, about 1.2 miles south of Maryborough, in the Goldfields region in the Australian state of Victoria. Being a gem digger, Hole had set forth on an adventure, geared up with a metal detector. Instead of stumbling upon a nugget of gold, Hole found this 37.5-lb reddish rock, which measured 38.5cm x 14.5cm x 14.5cm.

The rock was ordinary, except that its surface was dimpled and slightly shimmery as if there were tiny crystals hiding within it. Hole’s first guess was that the gold nugget was trapped within this rock. He couldn’t just give up on the possibility of finding gold. For more than a decade, Hole kept this rock stowed away in his house, experimenting every few days on it, with the expectation that it would crack open and a shiny gold nugget would pop out of it.

Hole finally surrendered to his failure and reached out to geologists Dermot Henry and Bill Birch of the Melbourne Museum, as he shared with The Sydney Morning Herald. Henry and Birch had been examining rocks for years, and seeing this rock, their eyes sparked with excitement. Their instincts told them that it had hurtled down from space and landed on Earth. They estimated that the cosmic gift was approximately 4.6 billion years old. “You’re looking right back to the formation of the solar system here,” Henry exclaimed.

Henry shared that, during his 37 years of working at the museum and examining thousands of rocks, only two of them had turned out to be real meteorites. And this was one of them. Within the hardy reddish crust, the rock trapped little silver raindrops from the super-hot cloud of gas that initiated the formation of our solar system.

Birch’s suspicion piqued when he picked up the rock. “It shouldn’t be that heavy,” he thought, and immediately suspected that it could be a meteorite. “It had this sculpted, dimpled look to it. That's formed when they come through the atmosphere; they are melting on the outside, and the atmosphere sculpts them,” he hypothesized.

This one was an “H5 chondrite meteorite.” Chondrites, the museum explains, are tiny crystallized droplets, called “chondrules,” that are still swinging in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. This one likely reached Earth after an intense event. Perhaps two asteroid belts crashed into each other, sending shards of rocky fragments flying through space. This lucky candidate caught fire and trundled into Earth’s atmosphere, where friction caused it to become red and molten. The superheated fragment whizzed through the skies and landed here. Carbon 14 testing suggested that the meteorite had been lounging around on Earth for less than 200 years. Scientists suspect that someone at this time probably saw it fall from the Australian sky.

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