Featured Image Credit: Josua Hutagalung / Facebook
A man in Kolang, Indonesia made headlines after a meteorite crashed into his home, only to find out later it wasn't worth the fortune people thought.
Josua Hutagalung got the fright of his life when the meteorite smashed through his tin-roofed veranda, landing just outside his living room.
The space rock buried itself 15cm into the soil with an enormous thud.
"When I lifted it, it was still warm," the father-of-three told the BBC's Indonesian service. "That's when I thought that the object I was lifting was a meteorite from the sky. It was impossible for someone to throw a rock that big onto the roof of the house."
Advert
The Sumatra meteorite, estimated to be around 4.5 billion years old and weighing 2.1kg, was classified as an extremely rare CM1/2 carbonaceous chondrite.
Many curious minds online suggested that the find was worth as much as $1.8m (£1.36m), making the man an overnight millionaire.
But the truth was, the meteorite wasn't worth millions.
So where did the $1.8m figure come from?
Turns out, the figure was based on nothing more than wishful thinking and some quesitionable maths.
Along with the large 2kg meteorite, smaller fragments of it were found near Josua’s home.
Some of these pieces were sold, with two ending up on eBay in the US.
The asking prices are $285 for 0.3g and $29,120 for 33.68g. This translates to about $860 per gram and if you multiply this by the weight of the large boulder, you end up at $1.8m.
"When I read that figure, I had to laugh," Laurence Garvie, a research professor at the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, told the BBC.
"I've seen this story so many times before. Someone finds a meteorite and they look on ebay and think it's worth millions because they see small fragments sold for a large amount."
He added: "People are fascinated by owning something that's older than the Earth, something that's from space.
"So you might have people willing to pay a few hundred or thousand dollars for a small piece. But no-one would pay millions for a larger boulder."
In fact, the price of it typically goes down as the size of the piece increases.
As an expert in the field, Dr. Garvie inspected pieces of the Sumatra meteorite and found that it's mostly made up of clay (70-80%), essentially making it an 'extra-terrestrial mudball.'
He explained: "It's dominated by a bit of iron, oxygen, magnesium, aluminium and calcium - that's probably worth one dollar, two if I'm generous."
Even though Josua’s discovery held a lot less monetary value than he thought, the meteorite still holds major value in the science world.
Findings like this can give scientists important clues about how life started on Earth and develop our understanding of space.
