Mars is dead. As the corpse goes, it is very interesting: the volcanoes are so large that they must have changed the rotation of the planet; Adequate climate to support seasonal weather patterns; A crack in its surface that makes the Grand Canyon look like a roadside ditch; Polar ice caps; Tentalizing, indicative geological features. It is interesting enough that humanity has taken some time and effort to find out.
According to this writing, there is a little plutonium powered robot around on the floor of a crater of Mars, which is yet to know the planet. Curiosity The celebration is the latest in a series of Mars missions that began with the Vikings in the 1970s and, to this day, has been intermittently successful. Our robots, though, are just vanguards. Eventually, an alien will travel the world, and it is incomprehensible that their target will be anything other than the rusty corpse of Mars.
Why is our scientific conception of the red planet so gripping? First, it’s a matter of convenience. It’s close and, for some definitions of ‘simple’, is simple. Exploring elsewhere will gradually make things worse. But the Martian dream is not just about efficiency. When Earth’s (completely illusory) canals were mapped in the 19th century, Per Percival Lowell probably didn’t think about the mechanics of orbit.
H.G. Wells was when he wasn’t This World War II. However, he considered death for Mars and the unscrupulous inhabitants of England in the 1880s, for whom an ecological collapse on a distant planet meant an invasion. The connection between Mars and war and between death and blood, of course, stretches back thousands of years. The name for anything does not come down to us as the Roman god of war.
It is the death of exile that is in our interest. Over the last few decades it has become increasingly clear that our favorite red planet was once blue. There was water everywhere on ancient Mars. What we see now is the ghost of a once dynamic world.
There is an important difference between ‘dead’ and ‘dead’. You never say a stone was dead (even if that rock is literally made of dead plankton!). You would never even say that Mercury was dead. Death implies life. But as it turned out with Mars, the language was reasonably accurate. There is no evidence that biological life ever existed there, but everything else suggests that billions of years ago, the planet used a thick atmosphere, a water cycle, and the bragging that we might need to inhabit the world. So what happened between then and now?
Mars died, and Jupiter probably killed him.
Mars is very puppy as the planets go. It is about 4,200 miles, and has about 15 percent of the Earth’s mass. Now that Pluto has been expelled from the club, it is the second smallest planet in the solar system, beating only Mercury.
It turns out that being small is detrimental to long-term survival at the planetary level. Strong magnetic fields are needed to prevent solar radiation from emitting lighter elements from the Earth’s atmosphere. On Earth, that magnetic field is driven by communication in its semi-liquid iron outer core, forming what are known as planetary dynamos. There was also dynamo on Mars. You will be shocked to hear that.
Low-mass planets lose heat faster than large ones, and while Mars still has a liquid iron core, it seems that it is not hot enough to produce the convection needed to power a compelling magnetic field. That certainly Used One is – you can tell by the magnetic rocks when the planet was small, but no one will be able to find evidence of active dynamos about 7.7 billion years ago. Without functional dynamos and a protective magnetic field, much of Mars’ water was erupted long ago by solar radiation from its atmosphere, leaving us with a very dead world.
What does the Guru have to do with this? Good question!
The last few decades have been very exciting for planetary scientists, who have finally assumed even more solar systems than we do. When we had to go to our own neighborhood, it seemed very reasonable. Rocky planets, some asteroids, gas giants, ice giants. Nice and tidy. But when we started looking at exoplanets, it turned out that the structure of the solar system is really quite unusual. Where are the super-earths? Where are the hot gopters?
It is important to understand that we are now wandering in an imaginary realm. While we have some geological evidence of the Matian Dynamo, and it may actually work that water once flowed on the surface of the Red Planet, we are now trying to unravel the mysteries of the solar system since morning. This is difficult, and when clear Is Correct answer, it will not be signposted. I should also keep in mind that I am in no way qualified to assess these hypotheses in any matter other than ‘this is interesting’.
Even so, the most interesting hypothesis, at least where Mars is concerned, is Grand Tech. This involves Jupiter wandering in the early solar system like a very annoying sunken ball. Jupiter was the first planet to form, and most importantly. It has more masses than any other planet combined, and has an incredible gravitational effect on its peers. And according to Grand Tech’s hypothesis, he decided to fall in the sun once.
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Early Jupiter did not reach its destination, but it was about AU from its formation point. Only 1 from AU AU *. sp A.U. This takes Jupiter well into the orbit of Mars, where it would have cannibalized almost all the building materials of Mars. You can also imagine what this tiny asteroid is doing on the asteroid belt. The reason for turning to Jupiter (i.e. handling) and turning toward the outer reach of the Solar System is Saturn, which ends in an orbit and slowly pulls it to about AU. And also a good thing, because Jupiter would mean moving closer to the Earth’s orbit, I certainly won’t write this right now.
* The astronomical unit is the current average distance of the Sun from the Earth.
If the Grand Tack hypothesis is true – there are reasons why it may not be, as you would expect from this type of research – the small size of Mars is easily explained: Jupiter eats most of it before Saturn is eclipsed (I will always think of the echo) Involving; I don’t know why in defense). And so, because of this complex turn of events, the dynamo of Mars shrunk, the atmosphere was stripped of its water by solar radiation, and the planet dried up and died.
There is another hypothesis about what happened to the dynamos of Mars, however, the most recent evidence of Mars’ magnetism fades with time. Enough large effects on a short enough time scale will, in theory, be able to stop the dynamos of the planets. Tuesday has seen a fair share of its impact, and is indeed a period in the history of the solar system (again, at least a partial hypothesis) that died 4 billion years ago. Known as heavy bombardment. L.H.B., ‘H.B.’ Is true, in which the planets were completely attacked by asteroids, comets, etc., and there may be many large influencers to close the Martian dynamo. Maybe.
This, incidentally, would still be the fault of Jupiter. The indications are that when LUBB would have caused LHB to flow Neptune into its current orbit, which would have disrupted the body in the Kuiper belt and thrown a good portion of it into the inner solar system.
In other words, Mars may be a vague he-glow of rust, but that’s probably not its fault. Blame the Guru.
