For example, is there a chemical that I can drip on it, such as gold is checked for authenticity.
How do I know if something really came from the moon or not?
I am often in desert areas, but there are millions of boulders. Sometimes I think it looks like a meteorite but I’m not sure. I recently had a rock that had tiny indentations, but termites may have eaten on that rock.
Answer
No, a simple test is not enough. Unless on the ice of Antarctica, because there the rocky ground is two kilometers deeper, and every rock on the surface is a meteorite.
Real connoisseurs, who have already seen many meteorites in their lives, can do it. But to make sure it’s from the Moon (which is very rare), you’ll need to do lab tests anyway that provide the exact composition. When the elements and their isotopes appear to occur in proportions more closely resembling those of the Moon than those of the Earth, one is quite convinced that they are moon rocks. Of course, we can only interpret those tests since we went to the Moon to collect rocks that we can now compare with meteorites. Before that, the lunar meteorites were already known as a somewhat separate group, but people didn’t really realize that they came from the Moon.
On this site I find three examples of questioners who want to know if ‘their stone’ was a meteorite, and each time the answer was negative. I have often been asked this question in other ways, after which I referred the questioners to a geologist, who had to disappoint them every time…
Answered by
Prof. dr. Christopher Waelkens
Astronomy
Old Market 13 3000 Leuven
https://www.kuleuven.be/
.