Location: Great Sand Sea, Egypt
Year Discovered: 1996
Est. Value: Unknown
This mysterious rock, also known as the Hypatia stone, was discovered in Egypt’s Great Sand Sea in 1996. The three-gram sample was unheard of in even our solar system, let alone the Milky Way. It puzzled scientists for a long time. South African chemists have been studying Hypatia since 2013, and as of 2022, they may have an explanation for the riddle.
These researchers think Hypatia is the first instance of an Ia explosion—a rare supernova (exploding star) that occurs in binary systems when one star is a white dwarf—that has been discovered on Earth.
The brightest occurrences in the cosmos are these supernovas, and Hypatia might be a rock that was ejected from one of those explosions. According to the chemists, Hypatia was formed when our solar system was initially beginning to form 4.6 billion years ago.