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Alien life may not be just a filmmaker’s fantasy anymore, as UNM scientists have discovered rich water content in a Martian meteorite.
UNM Institute of Meteoritics director Carl Agee said the meteorite, which he first received in August 2011, contained 10 times the normal amount of water in Martian meteorites. Although this does not prove the existence of life on the red planet, he said the amount of water in the rock makes it more feasible for Martian organisms to exist.
“It doesn’t say anything directly about (life on Mars) because we haven’t found life directly from the meteorite,” he said. “But in order for life to exist, you have to have water.”
Nonetheless, Agee said he is optimistic that life exists on Mars.
“There’s a possibility that Martian life, if it did ever exist, has gone underground or is near a volcanic area,” he said. “But we’re still dealing with a lot of ignorance about it. We need to look at more. Ultimately, the human species is going to go out there and visit Mars.”
Agee said the meteorite was first found by a Bedouin meteorite hunter in the Sahara Desert in 2011, who then sold it to a Moroccan meteorite dealer. An American meteorite collector then bought it from the dealer, but was uncertain about the type of the meteorite, so he gave it to Agee to be examined.
“It took me about a month to open the package and actually work on it because it was so unusual, and it was so different than anything that I’ve ever seen,” Agee said.
After spending a month doing preliminary research with the meteorite, Agee assembled a team of 16 researchers from the University of California at San Diego and the Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C. The team published their findings earlier this month.
Although the meteorite resembles the Martian surface rocks the NASA rover Curiosity is studying, Agee said it has a different chemical composition. He said it has probably formed by a violent volcano explosion on the surface of Mars.
“It was found in a time when Mars was transforming from being warm and wet into the cold, dry desert that we are seeing today,” he said. “This meteorite is probably sampling a period when geological … change was taking place.”
Victor Polyak, a senior research scientist in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and an author of the study, said the meteorite is 2.1 billion years old. Polyak, who primarily worked with age dating, said this is relatively old compared to other Martian samples.
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“It turns out that the age of the meteorite is also unique,” he said. “There’s no other Martian meteorite with this age. Most of them are much younger with less than a billion years old or so.”
Agee said the meteorite is the second oldest Martian meteorite ever discovered.
They based the meteorite’s age on a test called rubidium-strontium dating, Polyak said. This means they measure the number of rubidium and strontium isotopes in the meteorite. He said because they did the test with five samples from the meteorite, their findings are sound.
Agee said this discovery enables scientists to do fine-scale tests that Martian rovers can’t do, and so it will help the Curiosity mission, which is also looking for water on Mars. He said that at the moment he and his team are studying the mineral composition of the meteorite, along with the gasses trapped in the rock, which resemble those in the Martian atmosphere.
