Is Mars made of Smaller Mashed-Up Planets? Shocking New Hypothesis

The Red Planet is peculiar enough, especially for the fact that it’s theoretically capable of hosting life forms. A lot of scientists are clinging to hope that one-day humanity will be able to build a colony on Mars. And there’s no wonder why looking at how many dangers there are on our Earth: natural disasters, poverty, diseases, corruption, and so on.

A recent study presented in Natural Geoscience says that beneath the planet’s surface there are two types of Martian material. More precisely, there are unmixed samples of mini planets that came together for forming Mars.

Is it practically possible?

Although you may believe that the hypothesis is only theoretically possible and skeptics can always say “well, you weren’t there to be sure it happened as you say”, it actually can be true. Way back billions of years ago when the Solar System was in its primordial stage, there were countless pieces of material surrounding the Sun, such as dust, gas, mini planets and space rocks. Gravity pulled together chunks of matter, and thus the planets started to take shape.

Jessica Barnes, a cosmochemist at the University of Arizona, stated:

We weren’t even planning to test that whole thing,

But it was the results that we got from the crust that made us have to go back and kind of look at that hypothesis.

The research team involved started to analyze if the Martian crust had lost hydrogen as the atmosphere did. They believe the simplest and most abundant atoms in the Universe, those of hydrogen, are the key for understanding a planet’s formation. The scientists started to compare the distribution of regular hydrogen with the one of the deuterium, having the first goal of understanding the history of some parts of the Red Planet.

The scientists further analyzed two meteorites that crashed on Earth, and the two objects are dated from 1 billion to 4.4 billion years old. Jessica Barnes says that there’s “a fairly large piece of Mars’s history right there just in two samples.”. The team found significant differences between the two rocks, and the conclusion was obvious: the two lines of evidence showed that deep below the Mars’ surface there are two distinct types of rock remaining from the smaller planets that formed the much bigger Red Planet.

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