New research suggests that the ancient Mars temperature may have fluctuated between the heat and the cold period throughout the billions of years of life. However, these hot spells may have been harmful to come back to life if it existed on a red planet.
Mars may be a dry, dry planet today, but scientists know that the neighboring of the earth is much more damp and much similar to our ancient past planets.
These new discoveries from the researchers of Harvard University John A. Paulson Engineering Applied Science (Sea) were how Mars maintained its warmth and gripped the water billions ago. Suggests.
“Because Mars is far from the sun, it was a very puzzle that Mars had liquid water on Mars, and the sun was surprisingly surprising,” he said, a team leader of NASA Sagan’s postdoc researcher. One Danika Adams stated in a statement. “It’s a really wonderful case study for how the planet evolves over time.”
The team survey was published in a new paper Natural global science。
Mars hydrogen paradox
Scientists theorized the excess hydrogen in the atmosphere that despite the distance from the sun, Mars could freeze the liquid water without freezing the liquid water.
This lightest element of the universe combines carbon atom to form carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mars. As we know well on the earth, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that traps heat and causes a greenhouse effect. As a result, Mars could have been kept in a sufficiently mild state of dwelling liquid water on its surface.
The problem is that the atmosphere should have been short -lived around Mars.
As a result, the team will apply similar processes to Mars used on Earth to track pollutants, modeling how the hydrogen content of Mars will change over time. I was able to do it.
Adams and colleagues simulated how hydrogen mixed and react to other gases in the atmosphere of Mars and their surface. They discovered that Mars had experienced a temporary warm period about 4 to 3 billion years ago.
These fluctuations occurred in 40 million years, and individual episodes lasted at least 100 and 00 years.
In these warm and damp times, Mars was driven by losing water from the atmosphere to the ground, replenishing the water hydrogen content ironic and maintained the greenhouse effect.
The change in temperature on Mars was also reflected by chemical changes. The team has theoretically. Carbon dioxide would have been constantly reacting to sunlight to generate carbon monoxide. However, during the warm period, carbon monoxide has returned to carbon dioxide and changed.
This recycling process stalls if Mars remains cold for a long time and leads to accumulation of carbon monoxide and oxygen.
“We have identified all these alternate time scale,” Adams said. “And I explained all the same parts of the same photochemical model.”
Everybody really wants to know whether Mars has been able to support life, albeit simple and microorganisms in its ancient history. The existence of life may have been challenged during the period when the temperature was reduced and the oxygen level increased.
In the future, the team behind this study will return to the earth with the MARS sample return mission proposed by NASA, compared to the actual rock and soil collected from the red planet.
“The early Mars is a lost world, but if you ask appropriate questions, you can reconstruct it in detail,” said Robin Wordworth, a sea researcher and team member. “In this study, we will integrate the atmosphere and climate of the atmosphere for the first time and bring some impressive new predictions that can be tested if you bring Mars rock to Earth.”