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To have liquid water on a planet, you need a solid surface and, therefore, a crust. "Our results indicate that Mars could have had oceans and potentially life before Earth", Martin Bizzarro, of the Danish Museum of Natural History in Copenhagen, co-author of the study published in the newspaper [19459004NatureatAFP
A Martian meteorite, NWA 7034, found in the Sahara Desert and nicknamed Black Beauty, helped decipher some of the mystery surrounding the first period of March.
Seven grains of zircon, a hard mineral that survives Different geological processes were extracted from a tiny sample of this meteorite and studied by a team of researchers who dated its crystallization.
"We were able to determine that the crystallization of the surface of Mars was extremely fast: only 20 million years after the formation of the solar system, there are 4,567 million years, Mars had a solid crust that could harbor oceans and maybe life too, "according to Bizzarro.
These results contrast with "the current models according to which the solidification of the planet took up to 100 million years," he explains. "This new data greatly extends the period during which life may have existed on Mars."
Researchers say that discovered Martian zircons are "about 100 million years older than the oldest terrestrial zircons" (4,370 million years ago).
The discovery in 2011 of Black Beauty, which weighed 319.8 grams, has aroused much interest among the scientific community. One gram was sold for 10,000 euros, recalls Bizzarro.
The Museum of Natural History of Denmark has acquired 44 grams of meteorite, thanks to various media. Five of these grams were crushed to allow the extraction of the seven zircons from the study
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