SCIENCE:
An asteroid can earn every inhabitant of the Earth $ 1.3 billion.

Mass­a­chu­setts orbit­ing between Mars and Jupiter, and its esti­mat­ed val­ue is incredible.

The rar­i­ty, known as 16 Psy­che, was dis­cov­ered in 1852, but NASA’s Hub­ble Tele­scope ulti­mate­ly gave the peo­ple of Earth a clos­er look. The new study, pub­lished this week in The Plan­e­tary Sci­ence Jour­nal, indi­cates that the aster­oid’s make­up is key to its astro­nom­i­cal value.

To put this vaunt­ed num­ber into per­spec­tive, when writ­ten in full, it fea­tures a line of zeros that could almost extend all the way to the aster­oid itself. That’s $ 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This makes Psy­che 70,000 times more valu­able than the glob­al econ­o­my, worth around $ 142 tril­lion in 2019. All thanks to heavy metal.

Psy­che, which stretch­es 140 miles in diam­e­ter, appears to be made entire­ly of iron and nick­el. This metal­lic con­struc­tion sets it apart from oth­er aster­oids which are usu­al­ly made of rock or ice.

“We saw most­ly metal­lic mete­orites, but Psy­che could be unique in that it could be an aster­oid made entire­ly of iron and nick­el,” said Dr. Tra­cy Beck­er, plan­e­tol­o­gist and author of the new arti­cle , said in a report.

So how did the expen­sive aster­oid come about? Accord­ing to Beck­er, it’s pos­si­ble that Psy­che was the remain­ing core of a plan­et that nev­er prop­er­ly formed because it was hit by objects in our solar sys­tem and effec­tive­ly lost its man­tle and crust.

The aster­oid cur­rent­ly sits about 230 mil­lion kilo­me­ters from Earth in the Solar Sys­tem’s main aster­oid belt, orbit­ing between Mars and Jupiter. And, unsur­pris­ing­ly, NASA plans to vis­it it again. In 2022, the admin­is­tra­tion plans to launch a Psy­che space­craft to study the aster­oid in depth.

If they could just bring the aster­oid back with kind­ness, every per­son on the plan­et, all of us, 7.5 bil­lion, would receive rough­ly $ 1.3 billion.