Mars’ early life forms may have been doomed: Study

primitive life forms Flourished on Mars A new study finds that around the same time prehistoric life was developing in Earth’s oceans, the inhabitants of the Red Planet were doomed to fail.

It’s possible that Mars’ microorganisms were thriving right under its crust, devouring hydrogen in its atmosphere, about 3.7 billion years ago, according to the study It was published in the scientific journal Nature on Monday. The study says that the depletion of hydrogen on the planet may have caused an ice age that led to its extinction.

“The components of life are everywhere in the universe,” study author Boris Souteri, a postdoctoral researcher at the Sorbonne University, said in a statement. Tell Space.com. “So it is possible that life appears regularly in the universe. But the inability of life to maintain habitable conditions on the surface of the planet is causing it to become extinct very quickly.

“Our experiment takes it a step further because it shows that even a very primitive biosphere can have a completely self-destructive effect.”

The study suggests that Mars’ once humid and warm climate was favorable for life billions of years ago, roughly the same period when simple life forms were evolving in Earth’s prehistoric oceans.

But the Red Planet has been cooled dramatically by microbes consuming hydrogen and excreting methane, contributing to the thinning of the carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere.

The study says that while temperatures on Mars may have been between 14 and 68 degrees, they may have fallen by about 400 degrees as the once-dense planet’s atmosphere depleted the greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and hydrogen that it relied on to heat the planet. .

The research says that the increasingly harsh climate would have caused early life forms on Mars to burrow deeper into the planet’s crust to survive over hundreds of millions of years.

Eventually, they will likely have annihilated themselves — making a “a bit depressing” but also a “very motivating” issue, the study says.

“They are challenging us to rethink the way the biosphere and its planet interact,” Souteri said.

Meanwhile, the scientists said that during the same period, microbes on Earth about 68 million miles away may have helped promote a warmer climate that supports complex life because our planet is dominated by nitrogen.

“In ancient Mars, hydrogen was a powerful warming gas because of something we call the impact-induced sorption effect where carbon dioxide and hydrogen molecules interact with each other,” Souteri said.

“We don’t see that on Earth because our planet’s atmosphere isn’t as rich in carbon dioxide as Mars once was. So basically microbes have replaced a more efficient warming gas, hydrogen, with a less effective heating gas, methane, which would have been It has a net cooling effect.”

The researchers said the findings support the theory that microbial life may still exist deep in the Martian crust and may have survived near the surface of the planet’s warmer regions such as Hellas Planeta, Isidae Planetia and Jezero Crater. Lake system siteWhere is the NASA spacecraft to preserve the planet Mars collecting rocks.

And the rover collected, on Thursday, the samples that indicate this Signs of microbial life NASA said it was located in Jezero Crater.

“The places on the planet where those microbes are closest to the surface were the warmest,” Sutri said.

Usually the warmest places are the deepest. At the bottom of these craters and valleys, the climate is much warmer than the rest of the surface, which is why it will be much easier to look there for evidence of these life forms. “

with AP