The homeowner only realized the unusual rock in the garden was a meteorite more than 30 years after digging it up.
Blaubeuren Meteorite. Video: Twitter.
On July 15, researchers announced the discovery of the largest meteorite ever to fall in Germany. The meteorite had been lying in a private garden in the town of Blaubeuren, located in southeastern Germany, according to the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Meteorite expert Dieter Heinlein stated that the object weighs 30.26 kg. DLR also shared a video showing the research team slicing through the rock layers encasing the meteorite.
The homeowner discovered the meteorite in his garden in 1989. He noticed the unusually heavy boulder containing a significant amount of iron but did not pay much attention to it. The rock was forgotten in the garden for decades afterward. In 2015, the homeowner nearly discarded the boulder along with other garden debris but changed his mind at the last moment.
It wasn’t until January 2020, during a chance encounter with Heike Rauer, the Director of the Planetary Research Institute at DLR, and Jürgen Oberst, the supervisor of the European Fireball Network along with Dieter Heinlein, that he mentioned his rock.
He took a fragment weighing 23.4 grams from the boulder and sent it to the expert. According to Dieter Heinlein, the meteorite specialist, he could see the presence of iron on the surface of the fragment just by looking at it. The expert used a diamond saw to cut it into smaller pieces. What was found inside the fragment astonished him.
It turns out this rock is a meteorite worth millions of USD. (Photo: DLR).
Inside the fragment was a matrix of millimeter-sized chondrules. Chondrules are spherical grains typically found in a chondrite. They are composed of silicate, metal, and sulfide, and they are thought to have formed as molten droplets at high temperatures in the early Solar Nebula.
Chondrites formed about 4.56 billion years ago when various types of dust and small particles present from the beginning of the Solar System coalesced to form ancient asteroids, but these accumulations are small enough to avoid a melted state. Thus, the rock found by the elderly man is a meteorite that is billions of years old. In the eyes of scientists, it is a “cosmic sediment” containing vast amounts of information about how the Solar System formed.
The experts named the meteorite “Blaubeuren” after the location where it fell. They also noted that “Blaubeuren” is the result of a violent collision in space. This meteorite is valued at up to 5 million USD (over 115 billion VND) and is currently on display at the German Museum of Prehistory.
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