We know that Mars was once wetter than it is now, but questions about when water formed and evaporated are more difficult to answer.
Now a new study suggests that there was water on the Red Planet about 4.4 billion years ago, much earlier than previously thought.
It is based on the analysis of a meteorite named NWA 7533, which was taken in the Sahara Desert and is believed to have originated on Mars billions of years ago. Oxidation of certain minerals within the meteor signs in the presence of water.
These findings could push back the estimated date of the formation of water on Mars by approximately 70,000 million years, from the 7.7-billion-year-old deadline that has so far been the general consensus. Research can give a little insight into how planets form in the first place.
“I study the minerals in Martian meteorites to understand how Mars formed and how its crust and mantle evolved,” says Takashi Mikauchi, a planetary scientist at the University of Tokyo in Japan.
“This is the first time I’ve dubbed ‘Black Beauty’ for this black color and investigated the subject of this particular meteorite and drew some exciting conclusions.”
Planetary scientists are very curious about the story of the planets and the water on the moon. One of the biggest unknowns is whether the water in the planet’s body evaporates naturally, during the formation of the planet, through the influence of agroids and comets.
Ancient rocks like the NWA 7533 can help scientists peer and discover scientists in a timely manner, as they record the impact events on the planet they came from, and capture some of the mineral and chemical composition of the surface when they form.
In this state, it is the oxidation that is the sign of water. W.4 Billion years ago, despite some fragments inside the NWA 33 753333, it is our oldest record of Mars (for this reason, even a gram of this meteorite can fetch as much as 10,000 10,000).
“Unknown collisions or fractured rocks in meteorites form from magma and are usually caused by impact and oxidation,” says Mikochi. “This oxidation could have occurred if water had been present 4.4 billion years ago on the Martian crust or in a body of water that had melted part of the impact layer.”
Such an early view suggests that water was actually around when Mars was formed and that it usually plays into the formation of planets. Water comes with life, which is one of the reasons why scientists are so eager to find it around the universe. For comparison, we know that the earliest traces of life on Earth are at least 3.5 billion years old.
A close study of Mars is underway as experts try and find out when the water was and in what form it may have been. A recent study put forward the idea that there could be both liquid water and surface ice at the same time on the Red Planet.
The team’s findings also suggest that in the chemical composition of the atmosphere at this time – including high levels of hydrogen – the planet could have warmed life enough to melt water and survive, even though the sun was small and fainted during this period.
“Our analysis also suggests that such an effect would have released a lot of hydrogen, which would have contributed to planetary warming when Mars already had a ga thick insulating atmosphere of carbon dioxide.”
Research has been published in Science progress.
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