🏁 A Very Weird Little Rock 🏁

[thepest]

I saw the "Could this be a meteorite?" post... And remembered this stone I found while detecting... In the course of pulling another piece of South Jersey aluminum... Out of mostly sand in a wooded area no less... This stone popped out... Thinking it was my target... I ran the detector over it... nuthin... But it looked weird... and... it is exceptionally heavy... like a large lead sinker... It's too heavy to be granite... I pictured a bottle cap, an upholstery tac, and my recently found mercury dime for size... next I show an earth magnet pulled from a hard drive... If there was a whisper of iron.. that magnet would have grabbed on... The sandy granular looking spots don't show in the light properly... but they have a crystalline appearance... like when you find a broken piece of die cast metal... It looks like there is some kind of silver paint splashed on it... but it's not... it's the rock's actual color... It's not slag I recognize of any kind... I've found enough of that over the years... Is there such a thing as lead ore??? And if so... why doesn't the detector sound off... like when I find a sinker in the sand... Then my last thought was... could it be a small shattered fragment of a meteor??? I don't know... I just know it's small, heavy, and strange.... I hope it's not radio active

 

[Ronstar]

If close to a university or college go see their Geology Dept. Those folks there have the knowledge and equipment to identify anything earth/rock/meteorite type items. They should also have a geiger counter to check it (careful tho, I took an old WW2 Compass to them after the recycle companies load check sounded off. It was pinpointed to the compass which the glow in the dark stuff was mildly radioactive. About shut the building down when the alarms went off!! Lesson learned that day!)

 

[Geologyhound]

A metallic meteorite would be elemental nickel-iron. That would definitely trigger a metal detector and should also be magnetic. Depending on the age, it would also have a black fusion crust. For these reasons, I would doubt that it is a meteorite.

However, there are a variety of sulfide minerals which may look metallic. The conductivity of sulfide minerals can vary greatly depending on the metal component and the impurities. For example, the conductivity of galena (lead sulfide) increases with the amount of silver impurity. Suffice it to say, you can find sulfides which look metallic but will not trigger a metal detector.
Mineral identification through pictures is always a little dicey when no other information is available. The color left on a piece of unglazed porcelain when you scrape the sample across it is called the “streak” and can be very diagnostic. Relative hardness can also help narrow the field of possibilities.

Just based on the pictures, I would hazard a guess at molybdenite or galena. Both would be relatively heavy, have a metallic look, lack magnetism, and be invisible to a metal detector (depending on the impurities). Galena would have a lead grey streak while molybdenite would have a bluish grey streak. Molybdenite can also feel somewhat greasy to the touch, leave marks on your fingers (sort of like graphite), and would be very soft.

If you get a positive identification, please let us know!