If you have ever wondered what happens to a meteorite when it reaches the Earth’s surface? You will love this post! As we already know, most of the time our powerful atmosphere stops any foreign body that enters our atmosphere and disintegrates it so that it cannot generate any large-scale impact on our planet, it is something like Captain America’s shield. But this case has blown our minds, and it is that a collector, in 2011, bought a rock in Morocco that had been found in the Sahara desert, just like that, but the succession of events that occurred next was not expected by even Steven Spielberg.
And it is that, although it was already known that this rock was the remains of a Martian meteorite, it has taken scientists more than a decade to decipher what its biggest secret is! Do you want to know what it is? We will tell you: it is direct proof that there is (or was) thermal water on Mars billions of years ago! Stay tuned to find out everything we know about this stone and its important discovery.
“Black Beauty” and its secret about Mars’ past
This piece of meteorite was named Norwest Africa 7034 (NWA 7034), and is known as “Black Beauty.” It weighs 320 grams and was sold to an American collector in 2011 after being found in the Sahara Desert (Western Sahara).
Its composition is unique and contains minerals of different ages (so, it is believed that it could have been part of the Martian crust before breaking off from the planet), and it also has a mixture of various minerals stuck together.
A journey through time
The latest studies carried out on it discovered a mineral called “zircon,” found inside the meteor… and which is 4.45 billion years old! Practically from when the planet would have just been forming (or at least one of its earliest stages).
Finally, proof of water on Mars.
Until now, all the meteorites that have been investigated on Mars were from later geological periods, but this “Black Beauty” is irrefutable proof of what the environment of the red planet was like, as well as being an exceptional proof that it contains 10 times more water than other meteorites, and its analysis has revealed that it is also composed of aluminium and sodium, something unusual for a zircon that was purely magmatic. But it is above all the presence of tiny inclusions of magnetite (iron oxide) that suggests that it crystallized under hydrothermal conditions (water at high temperatures). We don’t know if you are getting the point, but this reveals that 4.45 billion years ago Mars had environments with liquid water, and what does this mean? That it could have been habitable in its early stages, although direct evidence has not yet been found, this shows that hydrothermal conditions could have favoured the existence of microorganisms.
Different hypotheses
Was there life on Mars? Could this be the reason why it reached Earth via a meteorite? We don’t know. We don’t have any proof of this either (and we probably never will) but this discovery, which was so “random”, has changed the whole vision that our researchers have about the formation of Mars and its more distant past. Did Mars harbour life in the past? Are we descendants of the organisms that lived on Mars? So many doubts arise every time we think about how our planet was formed, the others, why we rotate around the sun and what is beyond the universe that we only know. The world of astronomy and astrophysics is so mysterious and so vast that we can’t hold back the hype to find out what will be the next thing we discover about our existence!