Largest piece of Mars on Earth sells at New York auction for over $5 million

The largest piece of Mars ever found on Earth was sold for just over $5 million at an auction of rare geological and archaeological objects in New York on Wednesday, while a juvenile dinosaur skeleton went for more than $30 million.

The 54-pound rock named NWA 16788 was discovered in the Sahara Desert in Niger by a meteorite hunter in November 2023, according to Sotheby's, after having been blown off the surface of Mars by a massive asteroid strike and traveling 140 million miles to Earth. The estimated sale price before the auction was $2 million to $4 million.

The identity of the buyer was not immediately disclosed. The final bid was $4.3 million. Adding various fees and costs, the official bid price was about $5.3 million.

Two advance bids of $1.9 million and $2 million were submitted. The live bidding went slower than for many other items that were sold, with the auctioneer trying to encourage more offers and reducing the $200,000 to $300,000 bid intervals to $100,000 after the proposals reached $4 million.

The red, brown and gray meteorite is about 70% larger than the next largest piece of Mars found on Earth and represents nearly 7% of all the Martian material currently on this planet , Sotheby's says. It measures nearly 15 inches by 11 inches by 6 inches.

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's 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.

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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 space probe that landed on Mars in 1976, she said.

The examination found that it is 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, likely 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 was previously on display at the Italian Space Agency in Rome. Sotheby's did not disclose the owner.

The bidding for the juvenile Ceratosaurus nasicornis dinosaur skeleton started with a high initial bid of $6 million, then increased with offers $500,000 higher than the previous one and later $1 million higher than the last, ending at $26 million. The official sale price was $30.5 million including fees and costs. The original estimate was between $4 million and $6 million.

Parts of the skeleton were found in 1996 near Laramie, Wyoming, at Bone Cabin Quarry, a gold mine for dinosaur bones. It's more than 6 feet tall and nearly 11 feet long.

Specialists assembled nearly 140 fossil bones with some sculpted materials to recreate the skeleton and mounted it so it's ready to exhibit, Sotheby's says.

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The skeleton is believed to be from the late Jurassic period , about 150 million years ago, Sotheby's says.

Ceratosaurus dinosaurs were bipeds with short arms that appear similar to the Tyrannosaurus rex , but smaller. Ceratosaurus dinosaurs could grow up to 25 feet long, while the Tyrannosaurus rex could be 40 feet long.

The skeleton was acquired last year by Fossilogic, a Utah-based fossil preparation and mounting company.

Wednesday's auction was part of Sotheby's Geek Week 2025 and featured 122 items, including other meteorites, fossils and gem-quality minerals.

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A strange bright burst in space puzzled astronomers for over a year. Now, they have solved the mystery.

On June 13 last year around midday, my colleagues and I were scanning the skies when we thought we had discovered a strange and exciting new object in space. Using a huge radio telescope, we spotted a blindingly fast flash of radio waves that appeared to be coming from somewhere inside our galaxy.

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After a year of research and analysis, we have finally pinned down the source of the signal—and it was even closer to home than we had ever expected.

A surprise in the desert

Our instrument was located at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara—also known as the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory—in remote Western Australia, where the sky above the red desert plains is vast and sublime.

We were using a new detector at the radio telescope known as the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder—or ASKAP —to search for rare flickering signals from distant galaxies called fast radio bursts .

We detected a burst . Surprisingly, it showed no evidence of a time delay between high and low frequencies—a phenomenon known as " dispersion ."

This meant it must have originated within a few hundred light years of Earth. In other words, it must have come from inside our galaxy—unlike other fast radio bursts which have come from billions of light years away.

A problem emerges

Fast radio bursts are the brightest radio flashes in the universe, emitting 30 years' worth of the sun's energy in less than a millisecond—and we only have Hints of how they are produced.

Some theories suggest they are produced by " magnetars "—the highly magnetized cores of massive, dead stars—oro arise from cosmic collisions between these dead stellar remnants. Regardless of how they occur, fast radio bursts are also a precise instrument for mapping out the so-called "missing matter" in our universe.

When we went back over our recordings to take a closer look at the radio burst, we had a surprise: the signal seemed to have disappeared. Two months of trial and error went by, until the problem was found.

ASKAP consists of 36 antennas that can be combined to function like a single enormous zoom lens spanning six kilometers. Similar to a zoom lens on a camera, if you attempt to capture an image of something too close, it will appear blurry. It was only by excluding some of the antennas from the analysis—artificially decreasing the size of our "lens"—that we were able to ultimately create an image of the burst.

We weren't excited by this—in fact, we were disappointed. No astronomical signal could be close enough to cause this blurring.

This meant it was probably just radio-frequency " interference —an astronomer's term for human-made signals that corrupt our data.

It's the kind of junk data we'd normally throw away.

Yet the burst had us intrigued. For one thing, this burst was fast The fastest known fast radio burst lasted about 10 millionths of a second. This burst consisted of an extremely bright pulse lasting a few billionths of a second, and two dimmer after-pulses, for a total duration of 30 nanoseconds.

So where did this amazingly short, bright burst come from?

A zombie in space?

We already knew the direction it came from, and we were able to use the blurriness in the image to estimate a distance of 4,500 km. And there was only one thing in that direction, at that distance, at that time—a derelict 60-year-old satellite called Relay 2 .

Relay 2 was one of the first ever telecommunications satellites. Launched by the United States in 1964, it was operated until 1965, and its onboard systems had failed by 1967.

But how could Relay 2 have produced this burst?

Some satellites, presumed dead, have been observed to reawaken They are known as "zombie satellites."

But this was no zombie. No system on board Relay 2 had ever been able to produce a nanosecond burst of radio waves, even when it was alive.

We think the most likely cause was an "electrostatic discharge." As satellites are exposed to electrically charged gases in space known as plasmas, they can become charged— just like when your feet rub on carpet And that accumulated charge can suddenly discharge, with the resulting spark causing a flash of radio waves.

Electrostatic discharges are common, and are known to damage the spacecraft . However, all known electrostatic discharges last thousands of times longer than our signal, and occur most commonly when the Earth's magnetosphere is highly active. And our magnetosphere was unusually quiet at the time of the signal.

Another possibility is a strike by a micrometeoroid—a tiny piece of space debris—similar to that experienced by the James Webb Space Telescope in June 2022.

According to our calculations, a 22 micro-gram micrometeoroid traveling at 20 km per second or more and hitting Relay 2 would have been able to produce such a strong flash of radio waves. But we estimate the chance that the nanosecond burst we detected was caused by such an event to be about 1%.

Plenty more sparks in the sky

Ultimately, we can't be certain why we saw this signal from Relay 2. What we do know, however, is how to see more of them. When looking at 13.8 millisecond timescales—the equivalent of keeping the camera shutter open for longer—this signal was washed out, and barely detectable even to a powerful radio telescope such as ASKAP.

But if we had searched at 13.8 nanoseconds, any old radio antenna would have easily seen it. It shows us that monitoring satellites for electrostatic discharges with ground-based radio antennas is possible. And with the number of satellites in orbit growing rapidly , finding new ways to monitor them is more important than ever.

But did our team eventually find new? astronomical signals? You bet we did . And there are no doubt plenty more to be found.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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This story was originally published on newsrealtime .

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