Could this be a meteorite?

My brother has had this rock for years. He found it in the Okanagan in the interior of BC. It attracts a magnet and feels heavy for its size.
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Yes, and those orange blotches are samples of living alien highly intelligent fungus. You and your brother have without question been colonized by now and the spores are dormant in you both, waiting for word of the invasion when the fungus will take control and force your meat puppet sacks to do its bidding. Two men wearing dark suits and sunglasses will be knocking on your door soon-- do what they say.

Seriously, I found this website, which says a meteorite has these qualities:

Density : Meteorites are usually quite heavy for their size, since they contain metallic iron and dense minerals.

Check!

Magnetic : Since most meteorites contain metallic iron, a magnet will often stick to them. For “stony” meteorites, a magnet might not stick, but if you hang the magnet by a string, it will be attracted.

Check!

Unusual shape : iron-nickel meteorites are rarely rounded. Instead, they have an irregular shape with unusual pits like finger prints in their surface called “regmaglypts.”

hmmm…maybe too smooth and rounded…?

Fusion crust : stony meteorites typically have a thin crust on their surface where it melted as it passed through the atmosphere.

?? Hard to tell from a photo.

It definitely has a crust and we scraped a little off to see the inside and it’s silver inside. Now we’re doing a streak test.

Don’t get too familiar with it… :slightly_smiling_face:

More seriously, from your description and the photos, it does appear to be one. It would be interesting to know the exact location of the find, and if other rocks found there have the same characteristics - if not, then it is from somewhere else (glacial erratic, space?), and if so, then perhaps it’s just a chunk of local rock (not from space). The rounded shape lends itself to have been tossed around in a river at some point - it could be a cobble.

He found it in the Okanagan desert when he was digging for jasper. The results of the streak test are the crusty outside leaves a mark and the interior does not.

Don’t list to @solost who is just trying to frighten you into giving or selling the asteroid from him on the cheap. You should smelt it down, carbonize it using my proprietary process, and forge it into a shield that defies physical laws. My consulting fee for process metallurgy knowledge is a bargain at $50,000, payable by cashier’s check or in specie.

Stranger

Derserts are the best place to look for meteorites. But there is nothing about that one that suggests that it is one. A thin black coating on a desert rock doesn’t really help identify it:

Take a look at this site:

https://sites.wustl.edu/meteoritesite/items/some-meteorite-realities/

As always, xkcd has it covered.

The link referred to is
https://sites.wustl.edu/meteoritesite/

It doesn’t look like a meteorite to me.

Could just be ironstone, which checks the “heavy”, “silvery” and “attracts magnet” boxes, depending on exact composition. Although no streak is a bit of a mark against.

Are you willing to lop off a bit and then post a closer photo of the silvery interior? That should clear it up very quickly.

I’m home now and it’s at my brother’s so I don’t have access to it right now. Ironstone seems like a possibility.

If you crack it open and there’s blobby stuff inside (check with your fingers) then it’s likely of extraterrestrial origin.

Etching the cut surface with nitric acid or ferric chloride to bring out the Widmanstätten patterns would be the clincher.

Not all iron meteorites will display those lamellae, though.

Specifically, ataxites.

(Quote from XKCD, not DesertDog.)

It definitely happens. Sometimes “meteorites” really do crash through houses and are bits of debris launched out by woodchippers and other sorts of heavy machinery capable of launching things. They get featured on the local news. Sometimes they ask a meteorologist to identify it (a meteorologist, of course, is no more likely to know anything about meteorites than the random person on the street). Other times they ask a local astronomer or geologist. Astronomers and geologists may be somewhat more likely to have actually handled meteorites, but not really all that much. Meanwhile all the meteoriticists, dealers, and collectors out there are yelling at their TV screens because it is very obviously not a meteorite. (Reporting that to them will gain you nothing, because respected local astronomer said that it was.)

https://sites.wustl.edu/meteoritesite/items/thud/

Rather like consulting a physicist instead of a physician when you’re feeling unwell.

So here is what a really fresh meteorite looks like:

Thanks for posting that - so interesting!