Why are meteorites so expensive? Yang Kexin, a girl from Guizhou, picked up 400 kilograms of meteorites in Xinjiang for 5 years

With the marketing slogan "Diamonds are forever, a diamond is forever", diamonds are hyped into expensive luxury goods. But in nature, the most expensive stones are not diamonds, but meteorites. Nowadays, the price of meteorites has been fired to tens of thousands of pieces per carat, and meteorites are different from diamonds. Meteorites are usually a large piece, or even a ton of meteorites. This shows how expensive the price of meteorites is.

In my country, the area with the most meteorites is Xinjiang in the northwest. A post-90s girl from Guizhou, Yang Kexin, picked up 800 catties of meteorites in Xinjiang for 5 years. So how much are these meteorites worth in total? Why are meteorites so expensive?

Meteorite, also known as "Meteorite", is a collective term for cosmic meteors and fragments from outer space. Most of them are rocks, iron, or miscellaneous materials that have not been burnt cleanly on the surface of the planet. Most of the meteorites that fall on the earth come from the asteroids between the moon, Mars and Jupiter.

In fact, meteorites are not scarce stones. According to scientists, there are 50,000 tons of meteorites on the earth every day, but these meteorites burn up in the atmosphere before they reach the ground. The meteorites we can see are actually very huge meteorites, so they can not completely disappear in the air combustion.

This also causes meteorites to be relatively rare on the ground, and even the price of meteorites is comparable to gold for a time. In addition to the scarcity, another reason for the high price of meteorites is the elements it is rich in. Most of the meteorites themselves are magnetic, with an average density between 7.5 and 8.0, as long as they are composed of iron and nickel elements. These meteorites are beneficial for scientists to study the space environment. Depending on the proportion of elements contained in them, the specific prices also fluctuate.

Therefore, for many people, picking up meteorites is a way to make a fortune, but if you want to pick up meteorites, you must choose a suitable location. Because meteorites generally exist on a large scale in desert areas with dry climate and little rainfall, such as Xinjiang in my country and the Sahara Desert in Africa.

A meteorite named "Silver Camel" was discovered in Qinghe County, Xinjiang, my country. It weighed 28 tons and was called the crown of Chinese meteorites. And Namibia in Africa also has a meteorite "Hoba" known as the world's heaviest, weighing 60 tons. It can be seen that Xinjiang in my country and most of Africa are good places to pick up meteorites, so Yang Kexin, a post-90s girl from Guizhou, will pick up meteorites in Xinjiang for 5 consecutive years.

Yang Kexin, from Yinjiang Autonomous County, Guizhou Province, started working in Hami, Xinjiang in 2012. Hami is close to Lop Nur, and Lop Nur is known as a meteorite paradise. There are a large number of meteorites and other precious minerals in the Gobi Desert. Therefore, many people went to Lop Nur to look for wealth, and there were even rumors in the industry that "if you haven't been to Lop Nur, you don't deserve to be called a meteor hunter".

And Yang Kexin also discovered the fun of picking meteorites by an unexpected opportunity. Since then, she has been obsessed with finding meteorites. To this end, she devoted herself to staying in Hami for 5 years. During these 5 years, she picked up more than 600 meteorites, both large and small, and walked more than 100,000 kilometers. The total weight of all meteorites was as high as 800 pounds. And she was also dubbed "Little Meteorite Hunter" and "Woman Chasing Stars" by netizens.

However, Yang Kexin picked up meteorites not for selling money, but for scientific research. She wants to learn about the universe from meteorites, so she never tires of it. It is said that the meteorites she collected vary in price, some are expensive and some are cheap, but a total of 800 tons of meteorites can be sold for at least one million.

Seeing this, it is estimated that many people want to go to Xinjiang to pick up meteorites, and even hope that there will be a meteorite rain, so that they can get rich. But although meteorites are good, too many will bring disaster to mankind. Many major disasters in history are related to meteorites. It is said that the Tunguska explosion in Siberia was caused by the explosion of a huge meteorite, which finally caused the forest in a radius of 30 miles to turn to ashes, and the glass of residential buildings in a hundred miles was all shattered.

Going back further, the extinction events from the late Cretaceous to the Paleogene are also inseparable from meteorites. Experts speculate that the extinction of large animals such as dinosaurs was due to the impact of meteorites and comets. Therefore, although meteorites are good, don't be greedy for too much, otherwise people will lose money before they make money.