A German citizen discovered the largest stony meteorite ever found in the country. For the German Aerospace Center (DLR) this is a sensational find!
Blaubeuren is the name of the stony meteorite that a German discovered in his garden. With its dimensions of 28x25x20 cm for a weight of 30 kg, it is quite simply the most imposing meteorite of its kind found in Germany. The Blaubeuren thus easily exceeds the Benthullen meteorite (17.25 kg) discovered in 1930.
As the German Aerospace Center (DLR) explains in a press release dated July 15, 2020, man did not make this discovery recently but in 1989! At the time, the person concerned was digging a trench in order to install a cable there when his shovel hit a large rock.
The owner did not pay attention to it for years, a period during which the rock gradually deteriorated. But one day, he decides to get rid of it and puts it on his trailer before changing his mind. Finally, he will put the object in a dry place for better conservation.
In January 2020, 31 years later, the man (finally) had the idea of having his rock analyzed by the German Aerospace Center. The researchers thus cut a sample and were able to confirm that it was indeed a stony meteorite. One of the experts was also able to observe the presence of a matrix of chondrules (see below). These are small balls of the order of a millimeter that formed the planets by agglomeration 4.5 billion years ago!
While analyzes are currently continuing, researchers believe that the meteorite arrived on Earth several centuries ago . In addition, the owner wants his find to be on permanent display in a museum.
During the summer of 2019, we were discussing the case an Australian who had kept a 17 kg rock for 5 years thinking it was a gold nugget. Unable to open the rock, the man brought it to a museum in Melbourne. Thus, the experts determined that it was a meteorite of great rarity.
Sometimes discovering a meteorite can be worth a significant financial reward. In November 2019, the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum (United States) offered $25,000 to anyone who found a fragment weighing more than one kg of a meteorite that crossed the sky of the city of Saint-Louis and its region. While many people are still looking for possible fragments today, everyone could come back empty-handed. Indeed, there is a good chance that the object has completely burned or that it has been fragmented into a multitude of tiny pieces over a large surface.
