Digging the garden hit a rock, turned out to be a meteorite worth millions of dollars

In 1989, a man in Blaubeuren, Swabia, Germany, was digging a trench to lay cable in his garden when he found a large boulder. Initially, the man intended to throw the boulder away. However, it was too heavy and difficult to move, so he rolled it to the corner of the garden and placed it there.

The man forgot about the rock for many years. It wasn’t until 2015 that he suddenly remembered it. By this time, the rock had been worn down by wind and rain. He then used a cart to move it to his basement.

The rock was found in the man's garden, forgotten for more than 30 years. (Photo: DLR)

It wasn't until January 2020, during a chance meeting with Heike Rauer, Director of the Institute for Planetary Research at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Jürgen Oberst, supervisor of the European Fireball Network, and Dieter Heinlein, meteorite expert at DLR, that he told about his rock.

He took a 23.4 gram fragment from the rock and sent it to an expert. According to Dieter Heinlein, a meteorite expert, he could see the presence of iron on the surface of the fragment with the naked eye. The expert used a diamond saw to cut it into small pieces. What he found inside the fragment surprised him.

Inside the fragment is a matrix of millimeter-sized chondrules. Chondrules are round grains commonly found in a chondrite. Chondrules are made up of silicates, metals, and sulfides, and they appear to have formed as high-temperature molten droplets in the early solar nebula.

Chondrites were formed about 4.56 billion years ago when many types of dust and small particles that were present from the beginning of the Solar System, gathered to form ancient asteroids, but the type of accumulation is small enough to not be in a melted state. It can be seen that the rock that the old man found is a meteorite that is billions of years old. In the eyes of scientists , it is a "cosmic sediment" containing a lot of information about how the Solar System formed.

It turns out this rock is a meteorite worth millions of dollars. (Photo: DLR)

After careful examination, the meteorite was confirmed to weigh more than 30kg. It is recognized as the largest meteorite found in Germany.

Experts named the meteorite “Blaubeuren” after the location where it fell. They also said that “Blaubeuren” was the result of a violent collision in space. This meteorite is also valued at up to 5 million USD (more than 115 billion VND). It is on display at the German Museum of Prehistory.

Quoc Thai (Source: DLR)

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