From the creation of Mars, to the timeline that is now being reset for it, join me as
we explore how the Birth of Mars might be wrong!
I know what you're thinking, "What do you mean the birth of Mars may be wrong?
It's a planet!
And we know how the planets formed!"
And yeah, that's true, but as we explore our solar system and get various readings on the
planets, and get a look at their history, we find out that we may not know as much as
we thought we did.
New research is coming to scientists and noting that the formation of Mars might not be as
simple as we projected it to be.
To understand these new finds on Mars though, we have to look back at the birth of the solar
system itself.
So let's rewind ALL the way to the Big Bang.
When this massive explosion of energy and matter came through the universe at large
and put various amounts of gasses and other matter all around and just left it there to
be formed.
Eventually, in regards to our solar system at least, the gasses came together and compacted
and that caused a fusion reaction that eventually led to the birth of our star (we're paraphrasing
for time here as we want to get back to Mars).
So at this point in our solar system, the sun is out there in the center of it (in terms
of how we think about it anyway) and clearly things are going well.
But what about the planets?
How did they come to be?
Not so ironically, the same way that the sun was made, just with a lot less fire and such.
Because while the sun was going and starting to form, the Solar Nebula (the expanse of
gasses within our solar system left by the Big Bang) was still reaching out in all manners,
and the sun wasn't the only thing forming when it was starting to collapse.
Through this process, a lot of things were literally just "thrown together", and it made
not just the planets, but comets, asteroids, moons, and many other things that you can
find up in the sky.
It wasn't a "grand creation" by any means, it was more of a "throw it together and see
if it sticks" kind of thing, you know?
This is one of the reasons why there are so many objects in our solar system, and why
there are so many different kinds of planets.
Some of the planets are gas giants because that's all they had to work with (or they
had solid dense cores and the gasses just run to that) and when they were big enough
and such, regular matter like rocks and stuff couldn't stick to it.
In contrast, planets like Earth, Mars, and Pluto were able to go and be solid because
of the matter that was around them.
The gasses of the nebula were start a part of them, but they were absorbed either into
the ground or into the very atmosphere itself.
The further away from what would be the sun they were, the colder they got, while the
closer they were, the hotter they got.
And that's how the planets looked like they do now, right?
No, there was one last "game" to be played, and it was a killer in many respects.
I want you to imagine you're playing a game of jacks.
You know, where you lay out all of the spiked objects, you bounce a ball and you try and
pick up as many as possible in one bounce?
Yeah, that game.
Now, I want you to picture yourself about to drop the jacks onto the floor you're playing
on.
The act of you dropping them is the Big Bang, and how they stay once they stop bouncing
around is the formation of the sun and planets.
Right now, everything is fine, because there's plenty of space between them, right?
Or at least enough space so that they don't go bouncing off one another.
Now though, picture that gravity started to be exerted on them in such a way that they
started to move.
And not just move in an orbit, but move in such a way that they start crashing into each
other.
What do you think would happen to the jacks?
Exactly, they'd get injured, they'd get broken, and so on and so forth.
That's technically what happened when everything started to get fully formed.
On one hand, you had the sun, which was exuding such an intense gravity that everything started
to orbit around it.
Then, you had the planets, which had their own gravity, and they decided to try and pull
objects to themselves.
As if that wasn't enough, when the sun went nuclear, it created solar winds which went
and pushed just about everything out of the way of the sun and thus sending it careening
around the solar system.
This "blitz" if you will caused a TON of collisions, which meant that a bunch of planets, moons,
and other bodies were damaged.
In fact, it's believed that one such event caused the creation of Earth's moon.
Specifically a chunk of Mars crashed into the Earth and ripped a piece of the planet
out that made the moon eventually.
This kind of construction went on for many, MANY years, and it technically still goes
on today, though admittedly at a lesser scale and a lot less frequently.
The end result once the dust had cleared was that there were many moons or satellites (in
regards to space junk not the man-made object) orbiting various planets, and things were
stable enough to where the solar system was as it is right now.
And this is where we need to pause in the creation of the worlds to talk about Mars
once more.
Because the believed theory was that despite all the various impacts and collisions during
the early parts of the solar system the Mars surface and underlying elements were as we
know them now.
Except...that's not what happened apparently.
A new study from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio shows that Mars was
likely struck by planetesimals early in its history.
These large, long-ago collisions introduced "iron-loving" elements to the Red Planet,
and those elements, in turn, influenced how quickly the planet formed, according to a
statement from SwRI.
Using Martian meteorite samples found on Earth, the researchers were able to model the mixture
of materials that formed the early Martian mantle.
The study revealed that Mars received a variety of elements — such as tungsten, platinum
and gold — that are attracted to iron as a result of these collisions.
"To investigate this process, we performed smoothed-particle hydrodynamics impact simulation,"
Simone Marchi, lead author of the study from SwRI, said in the statement.
"Based on our model, early collisions produce a heterogeneous, marble-cake-like Martian
mantle."
What does this all matter?
Because it resets the timeline.
Many people felt that once Mars had gotten its core that the impacts on it didn't happen
until much later, but now, that doesn't seem to be the case.
The impacts were much sooner, and were much more frequent when Mars was just a core of
a planet and not the Red Planet that we know it as now.
"Evidence of these elements in the Martian mantle as sampled by meteorites are important
because they indicate that Mars was bombarded by planetesimals sometime after its primary
core formation ended," SwRI said in the statement.
If you're still confused, I'll explain.
The elements that are within a planet help determine what it becomes, but also, in the
early stages of its life, it helps determine how quickly it forms.
Based on what we knew about Mars beforehand we guessed that the planet formed in about
2-4 million years after its core had been established.
But, because of this new balance of ratios and the components of the planet itself, that
would mean that the planet took a LOT longer to form.
How much longer?
Well it's believed that the planet would have taken up to 20 MILLION years to form at the
max.
That's 5-10 times longer than initial estimates.
"Collisions by projectiles large enough to have their own cores and mantles could result
in a heterogeneous mixture of those materials in the early Martian mantle," Robin Canup,
co-author and assistant vice president of SwRI's Space Science and Engineering Division,
said in the statement.
"This can lead to different interpretations on the timing of Mars' formation than those
that assume that all projectiles are small and homogenous."
Now you might be thinking, "ok, so Mars took a lot longer to form than the other planets
in the solar system, what does that mean for us right now?"
Well it means that we have a lot more to learn about the red planet, and that's important.
Think about it, if the planet took a lot longer to form, then that means that the timeline
to the rest of its composition, and then the creation of the planet we know about now happened
at different points in its life.
What's more, these new balance of materials that are on the planet right now clearly show
that there is something more there than we felt before.
And these new elements and materials that were on Mars or are still buried deep within
Mars could help determine why certain things are happening on Mars right now, and/or, how
they led to the Mars we now view in the sky.
"To fully understand Mars, we need to understand the role the earliest and most energetic collisions
played in its evolution and composition," Marchi said in the statement.
I know this may seem like we're overreacting to something that clearly doesn't have a direct
impact on us right now, but given that we're trying to not just get to Mars with people,
but are openly trying to land on it and build a colony on it?
The materials that are under the feet of those colonists are absolutely vital to know about.
Especially if they can produce long-term effects on the colonists that can be harmful.
Not to mention, if we were wrong about the creation of Mars in terms of its timeline,
doesn't that also mean we could be wrong about the other planets in regards to how they formed
and when?
A domino effect could very much be happening here if we find the right data.
Which is why so many people are astonished by this find because we really felt we knew
what was going on in the universe, or at the very least knew about the creation of our
solar system and yet clearly...we didn't.
What if this means that the Earth might have formed earlier or later than we felt?
That could send all sorts of shockwaves through the timeline of our planet and radically affect
the notions of evolution and when certain extinction-level events happened and so on
and so forth!
The possibilities are there.
Now, of course, getting back to Mars, if there are even more materials on the surface of
the planet or within the planet that we feel we could use and try to extract...that would
give the people living there a whole other area of work to do.
Why does that matter?
Well, when we go and land on a new place to colonize, whether it's a planet or a moon,
one of the immediate issues we're going to have to deal with is that of materials.
Obviously we can't continuously ship things from Earth to Mars, or the moon, or another
planets moon like Titan or Europa (candidates that some people feel we'll live on one day
in some capacity), because that would deplete Earth's resources and not make these new colonies
sustainable.
Rather, after a while, these colonies need to dig up their own materials and minerals
and precious metals to do with what they need to.
And if there is a lot more platinum, tungsten, gold and iron within Mars that can theoretically
be extracted...that would be a HUGE boon.
Iron is useful for obvious reasons, but the other three aren't slouches.
Platinum is more valuable than gold at times, and can be a huge help in building things.
Such as a colony that needs to withstand all sorts of pressures from outer space and living
on a planet that doesn't have that great of an atmosphere.
As for the gold, we could use that to build, or, we could ship it back to Earth in order
to "pay off" certain things and expenses and help them get even more to the colony should
it need it.
The timing of this reveal is honestly somewhat fortuitous because when it comes to landing
on Mars, it's the big goal of the 2020's.
People from NASA, SpaceX and more are aiming really hard to try and get us there this decade
and furthermore get us to start building a colony there.
The more we know about Mars, what led it to what it is now, the materials that are underneath
the surface, and whatever else we can figure out will help us when we start to build our
potential lives there.
And we definitely don't want to be surprised by something that we thought we knew about
but was totally wrong on, am I right?
So I'm sure on the surface (pun intended) that the timeline of Mars doesn't seem that
interesting to you in all sorts of fashions.
But once you dive deep (pun intended again) you'll see that this one revelation could
lead us to various revelations about our solar system, as well as prep us for the mission
to Mars.
In that vein, this could be the most important discovery on Mars...ever.
Thanks for watching everyone!
What did you think of this reveal that Mars might have taken a lot longer to be born than
we previously thought?
Do you think we'll learn even more about our solar system through this discovery?
And do you think that this new information could help us colonize Mars?
Let me know in the comments below, be sure to subscribe, and I'll see you next time on
the channel!