In 2015, Australian prospector David Hole searched for gold in Maryborough Regional Park, near Melbourne, with his metal detector. While this wasn’t an unusual outing for the prospector, what he discovered was. He unearthed an unusually heavy reddish rock, which he suspected was a gold nugget at the time. He took the rock home and tried everything to crack it open – saws, hammers, even acid—but nothing worked. Years later, he took the rock to the Melbourne Museum to have them identify it. To his astonishment, geologists revealed that this “rock” was no rock at all but a rare 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite. Named after the park where it was found, the Maryborough meteorite weighs 17 kilograms (about 37.5 pounds) and has been identified as an H5 ordinary chondrite. According to Museums Victoria, the meteorite likely originated in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. While experts haven’t assigned a precise monetary value to the meteorite, they state that its rarity and scien...