New evidence from Martian meteorites suggest that the basic building blocks of life are present on the red planet, scientists have claimed.
A team at the Carnegie Institution for Science in the US who analysed 10 Martian meteorites, which span 4.2 billion years of the planet’s history, found that carbon present in the rocks came from the red planet and was not the result of contamination on earth.
The martian rocks analysed by the team including the new Tissint meteorite that fell into the Moroccan desert in 2011.
But the research, details of which have been published in the journal Science, also shows that the martian carbon did not come from life forms.
Instead, the scientists believe that the “reduced carbon” — carbon that is chemically bonded to hydrogen or itself — in the meteorites was created by volcanic activity on mars.
This is evidence that “mars has been undertaking organic chemistry for most of its history,” they argued.
The team’s leader Dr Andrew Steele told BBC News: “For about the last 40 years we have been looking for a pool of what is called reduced carbon on mars, trying to find where it is, if it’s there, asking “does it exist?”