Beneath Mars’s dull, dusty red exterior lies something hardcore: the fossilized remains of worlds that never got a chance to live.
According to a new study in Science, data from NASA’s recently retired InSight lander has revealed that deep in the Martian mantle are massive, foreign chunks of rock. They’re moon-sized proto-planets, smashed into Mars during the solar system’s early formation roughly 4.5 billion years ago.
Researchers discovered this cemetery in Mars’ belly by analyzing marsquakes, the occasional tremors that still ripple through the otherwise geologically inert planet. The seismic waves slowed down in weird ways when passing through certain mantle zones.
That slowdown is a dead giveaway that the waves were hitting something not native to Mars. Something big and, apparently, alien even for the planet that we always imagined our aliens would come from.
Mars Might Have Been Hiding a Dead Planet in Its Guts for Billions of Years
“We’ve never seen the inside of a planet in such fine detail and clarity before,” said lead author Constantinos Charalambous. What they saw was Mars’ interior pockmarked with ancient debris that turned out to be planetary shrapnel buried so deep that only a robot lander could have found it.
Unlike Earth, which healed over its wounds with the help of tectonic activity, Mars has no tectonic plates to shift around to refresh its surface. So instead, it fossilized its old pulverized rock that would’ve been another planet, preserving its remains.
This means that Mars is not only filled with mysteries that extend straight down into its core, dating back to the early formation of our solar system. It’s a planet-sized time capsule/graveyard.
Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.
The post Mars Could Be Hiding the Remains of a Dead Planet in Its Core appeared first on VICE.
