Scientists consider Mars could have been liveable for tens of millions of years longer than beforehand thought.
They are saying the planet might have been dwelling to life earlier than it lastly dried out. The floor of the purple planet was as soon as coated in oceans, lakes and rivers.
It could have resembled Earth through the earliest days of the photo voltaic system, experiences The Instances.
The speculation means life might have advanced in Martian waters, however not lengthy sufficient to have developed into a posh organism.
Scientists consider any life on Mars would have been worn out when the liquid water vanished from the planet’s floor, round three billion years in the past.
There are nonetheless competing concepts about what occurred to the water. Research consider it might have evaporated into area because the planet’s environment thinned.
Or grow to be sure with the planet’s crust earlier than it sank to create an icy layer of permafrost.
It’s beforehand thought Mars misplaced its water through the Hesperian interval, round 3.7 billion to 2.9 billion years in the past. Scientists now consider water might have been on Mars till the late Hesperian interval.
Researchers at Imperial Faculty London have now “discovered indicators that water was plentiful in Mars’s Gale crater, a 92-mile diameter basin simply south of the equator, lengthy after the planet was thought to have grow to be dry and inhospitable”.
The Curiosity rover analysis group additionally discovered deformed layers in desert sandstone that they are saying might have been made solely by water.
Dr Steven Banham, lead writer of the research, printed within the journal Geology, and a educating fellow at Imperial’s Division of Earth Science and Engineering, stated: “The sandstone revealed that water was in all probability plentiful extra not too long ago, and for longer than beforehand thought, however by which course of did the water go away these clues?
“This water might need been pressurised liquid, compelled into and deforming the sediment; frozen, with the repeat freezing and thawing course of inflicting the deformation; or briny, and topic to giant temperature swings. What’s clear is that behind every of those potential methods to deform this sandstone, water is the widespread hyperlink.”
