Nazi statue made from intergalactic space dust

November 1908: Morehouse's Comet in November 1908. (Getty Images)

In 1938 a team of Nazi scientists, funded by Heinrich Himmler went looting in Tibet, where Himmler believed the Aryan race originated.

One of the items they stole was a 1000 year-old statue of the Buddhist mythological figure, Vaisravana. It turned up again at an auction in 2007 and scientists who analysed samples have concluded it's made of intergalactic space dust. Sort of.

"The statue was chiselled from a fragment of the Chinga meteorites which crashed into the border areas between Mongolia and Siberia about 15,000 years ago," Dr Elmar Buchner from the University of Stuttgart, told PA."While the first debris was officially discovered in 1913 by gold prospectors, we believe that this individual meteorite fragment was collected many centuries before."

An original valuation of £12,400 dollars for the statue is now considered a vast underestimate. "If our estimation of our age is correct and it is nearly 1,000 years old, it could be invaluable, " said Dr Buchner.