Largest Martian meteorite to fetch up to $4 million at auction
The largest Martian meteorite found on Earth to date is expected to fetch up to $4 million at auction in New York.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Nope! According to experts, it’s a meteorite older than Earth.
A meteorite “crash landed” in Georgia on June 26. Particles that tore through the roof of a home in Henry County, Georgia, 31 miles southeast of Atlanta, were donated to a planetary geologist at the University of Georgia (UGA) to figure out where it came from and its classification, according to an Aug. 8 press release published by the university.
“This particular meteor that entered the atmosphere has a long history before it made it to the ground of McDonough, and in order to totally understand that, we actually have to examine what the rock is and determine what group of asteroids it belongs to,” Scott Harris, a researcher in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences’ department of geology, said in a statement.
The meteorite, the 27th one recovered from Georgia, was named the McDonough Meteorite after the area in which it landed, according to UGA. All meteorites get their names from the zip code they were found in.
How old is the meteorite?
The meteorite is believed to be 4.56 billion years old, UGA stated.
By comparison, the Earth is only 4.54 billion years old, according to the Planetary Society.
What happened?
In June, people across Georgia watched as a fireball, a very bright meteor, broke apart in the sky.
But that’s not where its journey ended, according to UGA.
A piece of that fireball forced its way into a Georgia home. It fell fast enough to tear through the homeowner’s roof, ductwork, and ceiling before it finally crash-landed, denting the floor of the house.
Fireball was seen beyond Georgia
Georgia was not the only state that saw the fireball on June 26. The American Meteor Society received 241 reports across several states, including Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The rock was around three feet in diameter and weighed more than a ton.
The National Weather Service in Peachtree City, Georgia, also received reports of what felt like earthquakes, but was most likely sonic booms, a quick, thunder-like sound that is created when aircraft, like rockets and planes, go faster than the speed of sound.
Where is the meteorite now?
UGA was given 23 of the 50 grams recovered from the home, according to the press release. Harris analyzed the fragments and believes that the meteor is a “Low Metal (L) ordinary Chondrite,” according to the press release.
“It belongs to a group of asteroids in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that we now think we can tie to a breakup of a much larger asteroid about 470 million years ago,” Harris said. “But in that breakup, some pieces get into Earth-crossing orbits, and if given long enough, their orbit around the sun and Earth’s orbit around the sun end up being at the same place, at the same moment in time.”
Given the classification, Harris expects that the meteorite was formed in the presence of oxygen all those billions of years ago.
The meteorite will be stored at UGA so it can be studied further, but additional pieces that also fell in the area will be on display at the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville, Georgia, around 43 miles northwest of Atlanta.
Contributing: Eric Lagatta, USA TODAY NETWORK; Joel Shannon, USA TODAY
Julia is a trending reporter for USA TODAY. Connect with her on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and TikTok: @juliamariegz, or email her at jgomez@gannett.com