NEWS
FEATURES By Eric Hand
obsessıon
J
1044
28 NOVEMBER 2014 • VOL 346 ISSUE 6213
Black Beauty, a meteorite from ancient Mars, has captivated collectors and scientists
Jay Piatek, a doctor and meteorite collector from Indianapolis, controls two-thirds of the 2 kilograms of Black Beauty known to exist.
Corrected 26 November, 2014; see full text. Published by AAAS
sciencemag.org SCIENCE
Downloaded from www.sciencemag.org on November 27, 2014
M A R T I A N
PHOTO: JOE MCNALLY
ay Piatek pulls his Jaguar convertible onto the highway frontage road and turns past the billboard that bears his name and a slogan: Weight loss. Health. Motivation. It is here, at the Piatek Institute, on the bland, exurban edge of Indianapolis, that the doctor made his fortune, ministering to thousands of patients who struggle with eating compulsions. Piatek has his own compulsions. Locked away at the clinic is a climate-controlled vault for his abiding passion: meteorites. With a near-photographic memory, he is able to rattle off the names and provenance of some of his more exotic specimens— Itzawisis, a pallasite found in Namibia; Gujba, a bencubbinite found in Nigeria. “They’re like little movie stars,” he says dreamily. There is one diva in particular that I’m here to pay homage to: Black Beauty, a shiny, scaly-skinned, 4.4-billion-year-old rock from Mars. It began its journey to Earth more than 5 million years ago, about the time humans and chimpanzees were splitting from a common ancestor. That is when an asteroid struck Mars, catapulting the rock into space. Sometime in the last thousand years or so, orbital mechanics and gravity delivered the wandering rock to Earth. Surviving an incendiary plunge through the atmosphere, it landed in more than a dozen pieces in the western Sahara. There the fragments sat, untouched except by wind and sand. Finally, a nomad plucked a piece from the dunes. After passing through the hands of several Moroccan middlemen, the first piece wound up in Piatek’s hands in 2011. He would acquire nine more. Black Beauty has since set the collecting world on fire, reaching values of more than $10,000 per gram. (Gold trades for $40 per gram.) The price is in no small part due to the parade of scientific discoveries emerging from the rock’s jumbled-up guts. It is the oldest rock from Mars and chock-full of the planet’s primordial water. Most intriguing of all, it appears to be the first martian meteorite made of sediment, deposited by wind or water. That makes Black Beauty not only a cosmic blessing—sedimentary rocks are fragile and thought unlikely to survive interplanetary launches—but also a boon for astrobiologists. “If you’re going to look for life, you want a sedimentary rock,” says Munir Humayun, a meteoriticist at Florida State University in Tallahassee who led a
SCIENCE sciencemag.org
Corrected 26 November, 2014; see full text. Published by AAAS
28 NOVEMBER 2014 • VOL 346 ISSUE 6213
1045
NEWS | F E AT U R E S
study that last year pinpointed the rock’s age. Even if it holds no trace of life, Black Beauty has plenty to captivate scientists. It is a breccia—a rock made of rocks, welded together in a fine-grained matrix. Each embedded pebble has a history to be unraveled. Black Beauty holds not just a geological story but an immense anthology. “We’re looking at the equivalent of a martian geological field area,” says Carl Agee, a meteoriticist at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Agee led the team that, in a 2013 publication in Science, was the first to recognize that Black Beauty was from Mars—and yet was unlike any of the other 74 known martian meteorites. As expensive as Black Beauty has become, it is still a bargain compared with proposals for a robotic Mars sample return mission. “I sort of half-jokingly say ‘Morocco sample return,’ ” Agee says. “Some of these meteorites, like Black Beauty, are the next best thing.” About a dozen institutions have paid dearly—or traded choice holdings—for the privilege of working with tiny slices. Many more scientists are in the queue for pieces. And Piatek, through a combination of luck, money, and quick action, has cornered the market. He controls about two-thirds of the 2 kilograms of Black Beauty known to exist. The pieces are waiting for us at the clinic. THE SUN HAS STARTED TO FALL on this
steamy July day, but Piatek is just revving up as he parks. Entering the clinic, he shows me a room-sized tank stocked with tropical triggerfish, a tank so big that Piatek puts on a wetsuit and goes diving to clean it. There are empty patient waiting rooms, decked out in a style you might call Greco-Vegas: plastic fruit, purple drapes, faux-Doric col1046
28 NOVEMBER 2014 • VOL 346 ISSUE 6213
umns. A few hours before, they would have been filled with people waiting for 5-minute visits with Piatek and his prescriptions of hormones, vitamins, and stimulants. His fellow doctors may look askance, but Piatek doesn’t really care. “They think we’re just giving out speed,” he says. “I’d rather have my patients love me. Screw my colleagues.” Normally, Piatek keeps Black Beauty and his other most valuable specimens at a bank
“It was the most expensive stone of my life. … I have never been so stressed.” Aziz Habibi, meteorite dealer
vault. But he has just recently returned from the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., where he attempted to make a trade, and so he hasn’t yet returned the stones to the bank. They lie in a carry-on roller bag inside the clinic’s vault. Piatek punches in numbers and tugs on the door. “Unbelievable,” he says. “Look at that.” The door handle is jammed. He fetches some tools and pops out the hinges, but the door is still wedged. Piatek calls his niece to summon more muscle: her husband, Brock. “Tell him to bring a couple screwdrivers, and a few pliers, but not little ones.” Then he calls another number. “It’s me, Piatek. I’m coming in with a friend.” He hangs up and faces me. “Do you like steak?” he asks. RUTH’S CHRIS STEAK HOUSE is Piatek’s
customary retreat after watching Indiana Pacers basketball games from his courtside Corrected 26 November, 2014; see full text. Published by AAAS
seats. There, over steaks and California cabernet, Piatek begins the saga of a 4.4billion-year-old rock and the 53-year-old man who owns it. Piatek was born in Gary, Indiana, to a mother who worked in the steel mills. His adoptive father was a driver for the fire department. He spent college summers at the mill, working in the coke ovens. “It was, like, brutal,” he recalls. “You’re blowing your nose for 2 weeks afterwards and coke is coming out, and it’s not the coke that’s good.” Medical school at Indiana University opened the way to a different life. After marriage, four children, and nearly a decade as an emergency room doctor, Piatek started his weight loss practice in 1995. Business was brisk. At one point, he was seeing 150 patients a day. But in 2003 his son was working on a fourth-grade school project on meteorites. “What’s a meteorite?” Piatek asked him—and an obsession was born. “I loved that you could get a piece of outer space that’s billions of years old, and you can hold it in your hand,” he says. There are more than 50,000 named and classified meteorites. The vast majority are chondrites, pieces of asteroids filled with little glassy beads called chondrules. Much rarer—and more expensive—are meteorites from the moon, Mars, and other special bodies in the solar system, such as the asteroid Vesta. At first, Piatek was disappointed to learn that he couldn’t own a piece of everything: Some were locked up in institutional collections, others destroyed or lost. He made a list of priorities and started hunting on eBay, quickly graduating to gem and mineralogy shows. At his peak, he had 1300 specimens. By comparison, Arizona State University, Tempe, which has the largest sciencemag.org SCIENCE
PHOTOS: (LEFT TO RIGHT) AHMAD BOURAGAA; MOHAMED AID
In 2012 and 2013, hundreds of meteorite hunters combed the sands of the western Sahara for Black Beauty—and found pieces like this 241-gram specimen.
university-owned collection in the world, has about 2000, says Meenakshi Wadhwa, the director of Arizona State’s Center for Meteorite Studies, who recently traded with Piatek for a 20-gram cut of Black Beauty. A few years ago, spurred by chest pains and intimations of his mortality, Piatek decided to cut back on both his working hours and his meteorite addiction. He brought on another doctor to do most of the work at the clinic. And he sold 400 of his specimens— including a couple of Black Beauty fragments —for more than a million dollars to Naveen Jain, a tech billionaire. Although the transaction delighted his wife, who never quite understood the value of collecting these rocks, Piatek winces at the memory. “I had stuff that no one had,” he says. “I had the one that hit the lady, I had the one that hit the dog.” Piatek has whittled his collection down to a prized 400 or so. But his passion still burns. One paramount goal: completing his collection of pallasites, pretty meteorites that often contain green olivine crystals suspended in a gray matrix like luminous polka dots. Of the 59 pallasites that are possible to get (a few others reside in untouchable collections), Piatek has 57. One, the El Rancho Grande pallasite, came in a trade from Agee, a genteel scholar who was once chief scientist for NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and now curates the University of New Mexico’s meteorite collection. “Our relationship was sealed at that point,” Piatek says. He has donated more of Black Beauty to the University of New Mexico than anywhere else, elevating its collection from obscurity. The relationship would prove crucial when it came to figuring out the rock’s origin. In 2011, Piatek bought the first piece, a 320-gram mass, from Aziz Habibi, a dealer from Erfoud, Morocco, who had been regularly sending Piatek pictures of meteorites for sale—including one he called Black Beauty. Almost on a whim, Piatek paid $6000 for the stone—cheap in the meteorite world—thinking it was nothing more than a regular chondrite. (Piatek says he later paid a bonus to Habibi when its true nature was revealed.) Piatek sent the stone to Agee, who wasn’t convinced that it was a meteorite at all. It didn’t have the heft of a chondrite, which are typically rich in dense metals. And the scaly skin—the “fusion crust” that forms on the superheated surface of a falling meteorite —seemed so shiny that it might be fake. “I thought someone had taken a desert stone and spray-painted it,” Agee says. Nonplussed, he stuck the rock on a shelf for a few months. Eventually, in the fall of 2011, he took a diamond-tipped rock saw, sliced SCIENCE sciencemag.org
off one end of the stone—and marveled at what he saw inside. Dark, angular crystals of pyroxene floated alongside white, chunky feldspars. Large, faint pebbles sat next to tiny, dark beads. It was evocative of the lunar breccias Agee recalled from the Apollo days—except that Black Beauty’s spherules were much more diverse. Agee now knew he had a meteorite, but what was it? He chipped off a gram piece and put it under an electron microprobe, which uses an electron beam to excite atoms in the rock’s minerals. The atoms then emit x-rays that reveal the sample’s chemical makeup. It turned out that the rock had an elevated manganese-to-iron ratio—higher than that in Earth rocks and consistent with other martian meteorites. Next, Agee and his colleagues used a laser to extract water molecules trapped within minerals in the meteorite and fed them into a mass spectrometer to calculate the ratio of deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen, to ordinary hydrogen. Every place in solar system has a distinctive ratio. Lo and behold, the copious water in Black Beauty was Mars-like. Agee was convinced that Black Beauty was from Mars—and also that it was unlike all the other martian meteorites. In a talk at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas in March 2012, he and his team described the rock as a volcanic breccia—a mélange of mineral crystals that formed
A winding journey The martian meteorite called Black Beauty is the oldest in existence.
4.4 billion years ago The earliest pieces of Black Beauty form in a subterranean magma chamber.
5 million years ago An asteroid impact strikes Mars, launching Black Beauty from the surface and toward Earth.
FEATURES By Eric Hand
obsessıon
J
1044
28 NOVEMBER 2014 • VOL 346 ISSUE 6213
Black Beauty, a meteorite from ancient Mars, has captivated collectors and scientists
Jay Piatek, a doctor and meteorite collector from Indianapolis, controls two-thirds of the 2 kilograms of Black Beauty known to exist.
Corrected 26 November, 2014; see full text. Published by AAAS
sciencemag.org SCIENCE
Downloaded from www.sciencemag.org on November 27, 2014
M A R T I A N
PHOTO: JOE MCNALLY
ay Piatek pulls his Jaguar convertible onto the highway frontage road and turns past the billboard that bears his name and a slogan: Weight loss. Health. Motivation. It is here, at the Piatek Institute, on the bland, exurban edge of Indianapolis, that the doctor made his fortune, ministering to thousands of patients who struggle with eating compulsions. Piatek has his own compulsions. Locked away at the clinic is a climate-controlled vault for his abiding passion: meteorites. With a near-photographic memory, he is able to rattle off the names and provenance of some of his more exotic specimens— Itzawisis, a pallasite found in Namibia; Gujba, a bencubbinite found in Nigeria. “They’re like little movie stars,” he says dreamily. There is one diva in particular that I’m here to pay homage to: Black Beauty, a shiny, scaly-skinned, 4.4-billion-year-old rock from Mars. It began its journey to Earth more than 5 million years ago, about the time humans and chimpanzees were splitting from a common ancestor. That is when an asteroid struck Mars, catapulting the rock into space. Sometime in the last thousand years or so, orbital mechanics and gravity delivered the wandering rock to Earth. Surviving an incendiary plunge through the atmosphere, it landed in more than a dozen pieces in the western Sahara. There the fragments sat, untouched except by wind and sand. Finally, a nomad plucked a piece from the dunes. After passing through the hands of several Moroccan middlemen, the first piece wound up in Piatek’s hands in 2011. He would acquire nine more. Black Beauty has since set the collecting world on fire, reaching values of more than $10,000 per gram. (Gold trades for $40 per gram.) The price is in no small part due to the parade of scientific discoveries emerging from the rock’s jumbled-up guts. It is the oldest rock from Mars and chock-full of the planet’s primordial water. Most intriguing of all, it appears to be the first martian meteorite made of sediment, deposited by wind or water. That makes Black Beauty not only a cosmic blessing—sedimentary rocks are fragile and thought unlikely to survive interplanetary launches—but also a boon for astrobiologists. “If you’re going to look for life, you want a sedimentary rock,” says Munir Humayun, a meteoriticist at Florida State University in Tallahassee who led a
SCIENCE sciencemag.org
Corrected 26 November, 2014; see full text. Published by AAAS
28 NOVEMBER 2014 • VOL 346 ISSUE 6213
1045
NEWS | F E AT U R E S
study that last year pinpointed the rock’s age. Even if it holds no trace of life, Black Beauty has plenty to captivate scientists. It is a breccia—a rock made of rocks, welded together in a fine-grained matrix. Each embedded pebble has a history to be unraveled. Black Beauty holds not just a geological story but an immense anthology. “We’re looking at the equivalent of a martian geological field area,” says Carl Agee, a meteoriticist at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Agee led the team that, in a 2013 publication in Science, was the first to recognize that Black Beauty was from Mars—and yet was unlike any of the other 74 known martian meteorites. As expensive as Black Beauty has become, it is still a bargain compared with proposals for a robotic Mars sample return mission. “I sort of half-jokingly say ‘Morocco sample return,’ ” Agee says. “Some of these meteorites, like Black Beauty, are the next best thing.” About a dozen institutions have paid dearly—or traded choice holdings—for the privilege of working with tiny slices. Many more scientists are in the queue for pieces. And Piatek, through a combination of luck, money, and quick action, has cornered the market. He controls about two-thirds of the 2 kilograms of Black Beauty known to exist. The pieces are waiting for us at the clinic. THE SUN HAS STARTED TO FALL on this
steamy July day, but Piatek is just revving up as he parks. Entering the clinic, he shows me a room-sized tank stocked with tropical triggerfish, a tank so big that Piatek puts on a wetsuit and goes diving to clean it. There are empty patient waiting rooms, decked out in a style you might call Greco-Vegas: plastic fruit, purple drapes, faux-Doric col1046
28 NOVEMBER 2014 • VOL 346 ISSUE 6213
umns. A few hours before, they would have been filled with people waiting for 5-minute visits with Piatek and his prescriptions of hormones, vitamins, and stimulants. His fellow doctors may look askance, but Piatek doesn’t really care. “They think we’re just giving out speed,” he says. “I’d rather have my patients love me. Screw my colleagues.” Normally, Piatek keeps Black Beauty and his other most valuable specimens at a bank
“It was the most expensive stone of my life. … I have never been so stressed.” Aziz Habibi, meteorite dealer
vault. But he has just recently returned from the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., where he attempted to make a trade, and so he hasn’t yet returned the stones to the bank. They lie in a carry-on roller bag inside the clinic’s vault. Piatek punches in numbers and tugs on the door. “Unbelievable,” he says. “Look at that.” The door handle is jammed. He fetches some tools and pops out the hinges, but the door is still wedged. Piatek calls his niece to summon more muscle: her husband, Brock. “Tell him to bring a couple screwdrivers, and a few pliers, but not little ones.” Then he calls another number. “It’s me, Piatek. I’m coming in with a friend.” He hangs up and faces me. “Do you like steak?” he asks. RUTH’S CHRIS STEAK HOUSE is Piatek’s
customary retreat after watching Indiana Pacers basketball games from his courtside Corrected 26 November, 2014; see full text. Published by AAAS
seats. There, over steaks and California cabernet, Piatek begins the saga of a 4.4billion-year-old rock and the 53-year-old man who owns it. Piatek was born in Gary, Indiana, to a mother who worked in the steel mills. His adoptive father was a driver for the fire department. He spent college summers at the mill, working in the coke ovens. “It was, like, brutal,” he recalls. “You’re blowing your nose for 2 weeks afterwards and coke is coming out, and it’s not the coke that’s good.” Medical school at Indiana University opened the way to a different life. After marriage, four children, and nearly a decade as an emergency room doctor, Piatek started his weight loss practice in 1995. Business was brisk. At one point, he was seeing 150 patients a day. But in 2003 his son was working on a fourth-grade school project on meteorites. “What’s a meteorite?” Piatek asked him—and an obsession was born. “I loved that you could get a piece of outer space that’s billions of years old, and you can hold it in your hand,” he says. There are more than 50,000 named and classified meteorites. The vast majority are chondrites, pieces of asteroids filled with little glassy beads called chondrules. Much rarer—and more expensive—are meteorites from the moon, Mars, and other special bodies in the solar system, such as the asteroid Vesta. At first, Piatek was disappointed to learn that he couldn’t own a piece of everything: Some were locked up in institutional collections, others destroyed or lost. He made a list of priorities and started hunting on eBay, quickly graduating to gem and mineralogy shows. At his peak, he had 1300 specimens. By comparison, Arizona State University, Tempe, which has the largest sciencemag.org SCIENCE
PHOTOS: (LEFT TO RIGHT) AHMAD BOURAGAA; MOHAMED AID
In 2012 and 2013, hundreds of meteorite hunters combed the sands of the western Sahara for Black Beauty—and found pieces like this 241-gram specimen.
university-owned collection in the world, has about 2000, says Meenakshi Wadhwa, the director of Arizona State’s Center for Meteorite Studies, who recently traded with Piatek for a 20-gram cut of Black Beauty. A few years ago, spurred by chest pains and intimations of his mortality, Piatek decided to cut back on both his working hours and his meteorite addiction. He brought on another doctor to do most of the work at the clinic. And he sold 400 of his specimens— including a couple of Black Beauty fragments —for more than a million dollars to Naveen Jain, a tech billionaire. Although the transaction delighted his wife, who never quite understood the value of collecting these rocks, Piatek winces at the memory. “I had stuff that no one had,” he says. “I had the one that hit the lady, I had the one that hit the dog.” Piatek has whittled his collection down to a prized 400 or so. But his passion still burns. One paramount goal: completing his collection of pallasites, pretty meteorites that often contain green olivine crystals suspended in a gray matrix like luminous polka dots. Of the 59 pallasites that are possible to get (a few others reside in untouchable collections), Piatek has 57. One, the El Rancho Grande pallasite, came in a trade from Agee, a genteel scholar who was once chief scientist for NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and now curates the University of New Mexico’s meteorite collection. “Our relationship was sealed at that point,” Piatek says. He has donated more of Black Beauty to the University of New Mexico than anywhere else, elevating its collection from obscurity. The relationship would prove crucial when it came to figuring out the rock’s origin. In 2011, Piatek bought the first piece, a 320-gram mass, from Aziz Habibi, a dealer from Erfoud, Morocco, who had been regularly sending Piatek pictures of meteorites for sale—including one he called Black Beauty. Almost on a whim, Piatek paid $6000 for the stone—cheap in the meteorite world—thinking it was nothing more than a regular chondrite. (Piatek says he later paid a bonus to Habibi when its true nature was revealed.) Piatek sent the stone to Agee, who wasn’t convinced that it was a meteorite at all. It didn’t have the heft of a chondrite, which are typically rich in dense metals. And the scaly skin—the “fusion crust” that forms on the superheated surface of a falling meteorite —seemed so shiny that it might be fake. “I thought someone had taken a desert stone and spray-painted it,” Agee says. Nonplussed, he stuck the rock on a shelf for a few months. Eventually, in the fall of 2011, he took a diamond-tipped rock saw, sliced SCIENCE sciencemag.org
off one end of the stone—and marveled at what he saw inside. Dark, angular crystals of pyroxene floated alongside white, chunky feldspars. Large, faint pebbles sat next to tiny, dark beads. It was evocative of the lunar breccias Agee recalled from the Apollo days—except that Black Beauty’s spherules were much more diverse. Agee now knew he had a meteorite, but what was it? He chipped off a gram piece and put it under an electron microprobe, which uses an electron beam to excite atoms in the rock’s minerals. The atoms then emit x-rays that reveal the sample’s chemical makeup. It turned out that the rock had an elevated manganese-to-iron ratio—higher than that in Earth rocks and consistent with other martian meteorites. Next, Agee and his colleagues used a laser to extract water molecules trapped within minerals in the meteorite and fed them into a mass spectrometer to calculate the ratio of deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen, to ordinary hydrogen. Every place in solar system has a distinctive ratio. Lo and behold, the copious water in Black Beauty was Mars-like. Agee was convinced that Black Beauty was from Mars—and also that it was unlike all the other martian meteorites. In a talk at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas in March 2012, he and his team described the rock as a volcanic breccia—a mélange of mineral crystals that formed
A winding journey The martian meteorite called Black Beauty is the oldest in existence.
4.4 billion years ago The earliest pieces of Black Beauty form in a subterranean magma chamber.
5 million years ago An asteroid impact strikes Mars, launching Black Beauty from the surface and toward Earth.
