Rare metallic asteroid Psyche spotted, worth USD 10,000 quadrillion

New Delhi : There are many asteroids present in the space but there is an interesting one metallic asteroid that is capable enough of fetching price equivalent to up to ten thousand times the global economy in 2019. It's worth a whopping $10,000 quadrillion ($10,000,000,000,000,000,000), reports said.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (Nasa) Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a metal-rich asteroid '16 Psyche' which is orbiting the Sun, in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The metallic asteroid is located roughly 370 million kilometres (230 million miles) from the Earth and measures 226 kilometres across (140 miles) - roughly about the size of West Virginia.

The findings have been published in The Planetary Science Journal on October 26. According to the report, researchers used the ultraviolet spectrum data collected by Hubble Telescope during two observations made in 2017.

Authors of the study said that Psyche's surface could be pure iron. They also suggested that the asteroid may be mostly made of iron and nickel. However, the exact composition of Psyche is still unclear.

It has been hypothesized that a piece of iron of its size could be worth about $10,000 quadrillion -- more than the entire economy on our planet -- a CNN report said.

"Psyche's composition may be consistent with mostly iron-nickel by mass," the study said.

Earlier, NASA said, "There are still contradictions in the currently available data, but the best analysis indicates that Psyche is likely made of a mixture of rock and metal, with metal comprising between 30-60 per cent of its volume."