Astronomers Just Dug Up a 30-Ton Meteorite in Argentina

An excavating team in Argentina just

pulled an over 30-ton rock out of the

ground. But is it really the world’s

second largest intact meteorite?

The rock was pulled on Saturday from

Campo del Cielo—a well-known

meteorite crash site in Argentina,

where iron meteorites abound. Some

reports are describing it as the second

largest meteorite ever discovered,

and, yep, you only have to look at the

footage to see that it’s certainly one

big rock. But there are still some

questions that need to be answered

before we give this boulder Earth’s

number two meteorite spot.

First, the rock needs to be confirmed

as an actual meteorite which, given

the field it was found, is not unlikely.

But the team from the Astronomy

Association of Chaco who weighed the

hunk of rock at 30 tons still isn’t sure

about the measurement and noted

that they want to do a second weigh-

in after rebalancing their scale to

confirm what they read.

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Even if the rock is confirmed as a

meteorite and does measure in at

over 30 tons though, that still wouldn’t

make it the world’s second biggest.

The largest meteorite ever found is a

66-ton meteorite in Namibia called

the Hoba. After that, though, the

question of who takes the number two

spot starts to get murkier.

There’s another meteorite previously

discovered in the same field of a

similar size: El Chaco. The Astronomy

Association of Chaco says that this

new rock is the larger of the two.

Previous reports, however, put El

Chaco’s size at 37 tons , which would

give it the number two spot over this

new meteorite. For now, though, all

we really know is that another really

big rock has been plucked from a

meteorite field—for everything else,

we’ll have to wait.