A piece of rock which reportedly fell from another planet has been auctioned in New York, and someone bought it for $4.3 million equivalent to N6.5 billion.
The rock which weighs 24.5 kilograms and captured the attention of the scientific public was sold to an anonymous buyer.
A report by CNN indicated that rock which fell from Mars is named NWA 16788.
It was discovered in November 2023 in the remote Agadez region of Niger, the report added.
The 54-pound (25kg) rock named NWA 16788 was discovered in the Sahara desert in Niger by a meteorite hunter in November 2023, after having been blown off the surface of Mars by a massive asteroid strike and traveling 140m miles (225m km) to Earth, according to Sotheby’s.
It was also a rare find. There are only 400 Martian meteorites out of the more than 77,000 officially recognized meteorites found on Earth, the auction house says.
“This Martian meteorite is the largest piece of Mars we have ever found by a long shot,” Cassandra Hatton, vice-chairman for science and natural history at Sotheby’s, said in an interview before the auction. “So it’s more than double the size of what we previously thought was the largest piece of Mars.”
It is not clear exactly when the meteorite was blasted off the surface of Mars, but testing showed it probably happened in recent years, Sotheby’s says.
Hatton said a specialized lab examined a small piece of the red planet remnant and confirmed it was from Mars. It was compared with the distinct chemical composition of Martian meteorites discovered during the Viking spacecraft that landed on Mars in 1976, she said.
The examination found that it was an “olivine-microgabbroic shergottite”, a type of Martian rock formed from the slow cooling of Martian magma. It has a coarse-grained texture and contains the minerals pyroxene and olivine, Sotheby’s says.
It also has a glassy surface, probably due to the high heat that burned it when it fell through Earth’s atmosphere, Hatton said. “So that was their first clue that this wasn’t just some big rock on the ground,” she said.
The meteorite previously was on display at the Italian Space Agency in Rome. Sotheby’s did not disclose the owner.