Can you imagine being 4.5 billion years old?  That is the age of the rare 52.8 kilogram meteorite chunk that is being investigated at the Royal Ontario Museum this week by Kimberly Tait, the museum’s curator, and the ROM research team.  The meteorite is about the size of a school packsack, and it was found in Springwater, Saskatchewan last year.  The type of meteorite is called a pallasite – one of 84 found on the entire planet.   There are only 84 pallasites of all the 35,000 meteorites found on Earth.  Inside the rock, to the naked eye, there are translucent greenish spots of a silicate mineral called olivine mixed in with a grey-colored iron/nickel alloy.  What is special about this particular piece of pallasite is… (more…)