Forget the flowers and chocolates (do people still do that?), the fancy dinner, and expensive jewelry. This Valentine’s Day you can give the gift of space history and throw down a cool $500,000 for this heart-shaped meteorite.
The specimen from space, which plummeted to Earth in 1947 and discovered in Siberia, is up for sale by British auction house Christie’s, CNN reports. Online bidding for it opens on February 4 and ends on Valentine’s Day.
Christie’s says the meteorite was part of an asteroid belt from 320 million years ago. When it split apart from the cluster, it penetrated Earth’s atmosphere and crashed into the Sikhote-Alin Mountains in Siberia.
The meteorites that made it through the atmosphere ended up creating almost 200 craters, some over 80 feet wide. The impact was so extreme that glass windows shattered, trees were yanked from the soil and sonic booms were felt some 200 miles away.
The object’s shape and size factor into the astronomical expected price, which ranges from $300,000 to $500,000. “The price does seem high for an iron meteorite,” Sarah Crowther, from the University of Manchester’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, explains. Other pieces of the same meteorite are worth far less. “In the range of $1-$4 per gram,” she said, “whereas even the lower end of the estimated price range for this is almost $30 per gram.
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