Galena?

[Berlin77]

Please help identify this rock. My 8 year old future geologist found it and knew it it was to heavy to be a "standard" rock. So he broke it in half and found a very interesting metallic pattern. Any help is appreciated as I know nothing about minerals. Our best guess is Galena?

 

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[DDancer]

Yep that looks like Galena alright. Streak test should be gray and when scratched with a knife will chip into little crumbly bits which if looked at under a magnifier will be cube like.... but you don't have to go that far you have some nice cleavages to look at already. If you collect about a gram of fine material and place it on a brick then fire it with a torch, carefully and use eye protection, you can smelt yourself a little bead of lead. Don't torch a large piece~ Galena will pop and shoot hot chips.

Congratulations to the young rock hound

 

[Berlin77]

Yep that looks like Galena alright. Streak test should be gray and when scratched with a knife will chip into little crumbly bits which if looked at under a magnifier will be cube like.... but you don't have to go that far you have some nice cleavages to look at already. If you collect about a gram of fine material and place it on a brick then fire it with a torch, carefully and use eye protection, you can smelt yourself a little bead of lead. Don't torch a large piece~ Galena will pop and shoot hot chips.

Congratulations to the young rock hound

DDancer, thanks for the reply! Streak test was very dark grey almost black. It does chip into little bits. Our magnifier is packed away somewhere however the larger bits are defiantly cube like. We torched a sample. It did melt into a mass but it never liquified like lead fishing weights do. It just kind of formed into a blob and then would not change shape after that(see below). No slag (if that is the correct term) left over.

 

[DDancer]

Galena carries a lot of impurities so your fired piece is what you can expect for it. Other materials that can be found in galena are silver, copper, bismuth, antimony and arsenic. In gold country a bit of gold may be present as well. By firing it you've removed most of the sulfides and free'd up the base metals. Your blob should be somewhat malleable now where as before the sample was brittle. Pure lead will flow but with impurities you have an alloy that will be have a little differently

 

[Eu_citzen]

Nice sample of galena!