Piece of moon rock weighing nearly 30 pounds goes on sale at Christie’s

A 30-pound piece of the Moon, larger than anything returned to Earth by NASA’s Apollo astronauts, is for sale and could fetch up to £ 2 million.

Christie’s auction house has the rare rock for sale and they say it is the fifth largest lunar meteorite in existence that is for private sale.

The rock was ejected from the Moon’s surface by an asteroid or comet that collided with the lunar surface, sending it speeding through space to land on Earth.

It was found in the Sahara desert two years ago and with only 1,433 pounds of lunar meteorites known to exist – it is one of the most valuable substances on the planet.

Christie’s auction house has the rare rock for sale and they say it is the fifth largest lunar meteorite in existence that is for private sale

This particular meteorite, called NWA 12691, was part of a large meteor shower that stretches along the borders of Western Sahara, Algeria, and Mauritania.

The exact date is unknown, but the rain was responsible for almost half of all known lunar meteorites discovered on Earth.

Approximately 30 different meteorites were collected, analyzed, classified, and assigned different NWA numbers from that rain.

This was in the belief that they could be from different events and represent different lunar samples, but now they are all believed to come from the same lunar impact event.

James Hyslop, Christie’s Director of Science and Natural History, said the size of this rock “overwhelms” him every time he sees it in the warehouse.

‘It is much bigger than anything else that has been offered before. The experience of having a piece of another world in your hands is something you will never forget, ” said Hyslop.

Scientists identify moon rocks by their specific textural, mineralogical, chemical, and isotopic signatures.

The rock was ejected from the Moon’s surface by an asteroid or comet that collided with the lunar surface; this sent her speeding through space to land on Earth

Many of the common minerals found on Earth are rare or absent on the Moon, while some lunar minerals are unknown on Earth.

Furthermore, lunar rocks contain gases captured from the solar wind with very different isotope ratios of the same gases found on Earth.

“It is an order of magnitude larger than any other lunar meteorite we have sold,” said Hyslop.

“All of the examples above would have fit in his hand, but this is more than 10 times greater.”

The largest moon rock brought to Earth by Apollo astronauts was a specimen nicknamed ‘Big Muley’: it was returned by Apollo 16 in 1972 and weighed 26 pounds.

Scientists disagree on how the Moon formed, but many believe it was the result of an impact between Earth and another planet.

Many researchers believe that the moon formed after Earth was hit by a planet the size of Mars billions of years ago.

This is called the giant impact hypothesis.

The theory suggests that the moon is made up of debris left behind after a collision between our planet and a body about 4.5 billion years ago.

The colliding body is sometimes called Theia, after the mythical Greek Titan who was the mother of Selene, the goddess of the moon.

Many researchers believe that the moon formed after Earth was hit by a planet the size of Mars billions of years ago. This is called the giant impact hypothesis.

But a mystery has persisted, revealed by the rocks that the Apollo astronauts brought from the moon: Why are the moon and Earth so similar in composition?

Several different theories have emerged over the years to explain the similar fingerprints of Earth and the moon.

Perhaps the impact created a huge cloud of debris that completely mixed with Earth and then condensed to form the moon.

Or Theia could, coincidentally, have been chemically similar to Young Earth.

A third possibility is that the moon was formed from earth materials, rather than from Theia, although this would have been a very unusual type of impact.