AUSTIN (KXAN) — The discovery of life on Mars is a tad closer than ever before. This month, NASA announced the discovery of signs of life on the red planet in deposits of clay and silt in a canyon. The rocks are rich in organic carbon, sulfur, rust and phosphorous.
“The combination of chemical compounds we found in the Bright Angel formation could have been a rich source of energy for microbial metabolisms,” said Perseverance scientist Joel Hurowitz, lead author of the paper, in a statement.
How did this life survive? New research out of the University of Texas in Austin is revealing how an atmosphere may have formed billions of years ago.
“I think to have such kind of a fundamental question about was Mars habitable three to 4 billion years ago? Was there life there? And how is that possible?” said Lucia Bellino, a Ph.D. candidate at the Jackson School of Geosciences and lead author of a new paper published in Science Advances.
In the paper, Bellino looked beneath the surface. Billions of years ago, the planet was more active volcanically. Volcanoes on the surface spewed out sulfur.
Sulfur and greenhouse gas
Previously, scientists believed that this sulfur had more oxygen. A new analysis conducted by Bellino using meteor samples from Mars found that this sulfur was “reduced” as it moved through the planet’s magma.
These types of sulfur included sodium sulfide (H₂S), disulfur (S₂) and possibly sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), highly reactive forms of sulfur that serve as excellent greenhouse gasses.
“(These types of sulfur) could have helped form a hazy atmosphere on early Mars, so we might have had haze there, and then also, could have also contributed to a greenhouse atmosphere,” Bellino said.
With this haze, the world would have been much warmer than it is today. “We have this new mechanism through which sulfur could have been a really key ingredient in shaping habitable conditions for early Mars,” Bellino said.
Bellino said this type of changed sulfur is also found on Earth, in areas with microbial life.
“It emphasizes the need to kind of bring these samples home and keep investigating whether early Mars was habitable, and maybe even if there could have been life on early Mars,” she said.
Researchers ran more than 40 computer simulations with varied temperatures, concentrations, and chemistry to estimate the gases that may have been emitted on early Mars.
Mars is further from the Sun than Earth and has a thin atmosphere. The average temperature is -80 degrees Fahrenheit. Bellino hopes her research can be used by teams modeling the climate of the planet to determine how warm Mars might have been and if it could have supported life.
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