Two new articles offer clues to the weird story of Mars

Regarding humans, Mars has two stories. We are in the present: We are trying to send our ships and our astronauts on the red planet to understand what it is today. But much of this work is intended to tell a second story-what the planet in use be like.

A pair of new results continues to elucidate this story. We discuss the first days of the planet, finding that its crust could have solidified even earlier than that of the Earth. The second adds evidence to the idea that surface water, perhaps from rain or ice melt, could have produced the network of branched valleys of the planet. All that to say that if Mars could look like a red orb and died today, it was not the case in the past.

"The main thing we know that makes life possible is the presence of liquid water," Linda Linda Gizmodo told Linda Elkins-Tanton, a global scientist at the State University of Toronto. Arizona, which was not involved in any of these new studies. "And we know that it could have existed up to the crystallization and solidification" of the Earth's crust.

Scientists thought that Mars ended up forming as a planet around 5 million years after the birth of the solar system, and then took somewhere between 30 million and 100 million years ago for its crust solidifies. But how could we understand such a process of the Earth? Well, at some point in the history of Mars, fragments of the Earth's crust broke loose and reached Earth in the form of meteorites. Inside these meteorites are clues to the early history of the planet, as when its crystals were formed.

The first team of researchers badyzed Martian meteorites for zircons, special crystals that form from melting magma and can selectively trap uranium atoms – but not lead atoms. This is important because the uranium decays to lead by radioactivity. This means that any lead that researchers find in zircon must come from the decayed uranium – decay, which helps to determine quite accurately the age of zircon.

The badysis of seven zircons, they found ages from 4,476 billion to 4,430 billion years, according to the document Nature. The researchers used these data to infer that the Martian crust could have solidified only 20 million years after the formation of the planet, although their badysis also reveals that perhaps in its first hundred millions of years. years, the crust melted and solidified.

Yet they are old. "These zircons, which are about 100 million years older than the oldest terrestrial zircons, tell us that Mars has evolved into a completely differentiated planet with a crust much earlier than the Earth," says Martin Gizzarro, professor of cosmochemistry at Gizmodo.

Elkins-Tanton was impressed by the badysis of the team and told Gizmodo that it would be exciting (but very difficult) to learn exactly where the meteor was coming from, then go there and continue the badysis.

Advance quickly until the current March, and you will notice cbads dug into the planet as a network of rivers. Many think that, well, these were a network of rivers. Another team badyzed the angles that river channels make on the Earth when they fork off from a source of mother water. They also did the same badysis with the Martian channels. Patterns on Mars appeared closer to river systems in the drier areas of the Earth, which have smaller branching angles than wetter areas, according to the article published in Scientific advances.

This means "you need melt water, or you need rainfall", rather than groundwater, to create what researchers have seen, said Professor Hansjörg Seybold of the 39 ETH Zürich. "We would then badume that the past climate of Mars had an active hydrological cycle."

You might not be convinced by an badysis that only compares the shapes of the channel systems. It was a limit that Professor Kirsten Siebach of Rice University, who has not participated in any studies, mentioned to Gizmodo – it's hard to say what other factors could lead to some forms . But she thought that the badysis was still interesting and that the idea that Mars had melt water or rainfall that carve these channels is compelling, if you add the essential evidence recent.

"I think it's supporting a story as part of a series of documents constantly telling us that we need to think of Mars a little more like Earth," she said, "which is exciting ".

There is much more to learn, and as usual, it is difficult to say exactly what our cosmic neighbor looked like. But combined with other recent news about organic molecules on the red planet, our vision of Martian history is becoming clearer. Maybe it was a little more out of the way than its current appearance suggests.