The “doorways” found on Mars are not for aliens. This is how it was actually formed.
No, this is not the gateway to the Martians. The internet exploded on Thursday after a photo from NASA’s Curiosity Rover appeared to show an “alien door,” but experts are convinced it’s a natural feature of the Martian landscape. I am.
“This is a very interesting image,” British geologist Neil Hodgkins, who studied Martian geology, told Live Science. “But in short, it looks like a natural erosion to me.”
Curiosity snapped the image on May 7th with a mast camera (abbreviated as “mast cam”). Released by NASA The second half of the week.
Some color images are created from the original black and white image. This includes a panorama created by stitching together some of the photos of curiosity. Gigapan.comThe website of a panoramic photography company.
Related: Seeing things on Mars: The history of Mars’ illusions
Some clues reveal that the subject of the image is not the actual door. First, the height is less than 3 feet (1 meter). Nicolas Mangold, a planetary geologist at the University of Nantes, France, emailed Live Science.
Or, this may indicate that the Martians were small, he equipped.
Other joke suggestions from the internet included the idea that it was the tomb of Jesus’ space. ET crib. Or video game savepoints, Deputy website reported..
But the real answer is that it’s none of them. Instead, what looks like a door is actually a shallow opening in the rock, which is almost certainly caused by the forces of nature, experts say.
Mars erodes
So what is it if the door is not a door?
Hodgkins, Vice President of the British Earth Science Company searcher“Doors” are believed to be caused by erosion.
A layer of rock called a stratum is found on top of the rock, with the left side low and the right side high. “These are silty beds, and the harder sand beds stand out,” he told Live Science in an email.
“They were probably deposited 4 billion years ago under sedimentary conditions, probably in rivers (certainly more outcrops need to be seen) or wind-blown dunes.”
Related: Is there water on Mars?
He said the Martian wind has been eroding the formation since it was exposed to the surface, and the image even shows traces inside the “door.”
Some natural vertical crevices are also shown in the image. Among them are crevices caused by the rocky weather on Mars. And he said that small caves or “doors” seemed to have formed where vertical fissures intersected the formation.
He said it seemed that “a large rock had fallen by its weight” to create a door-shaped cave. “”gravity It’s not very strong on Mars, but it’s strong enough to do this. ”
The culprit is a rock on the surface just to the right of the “door” with smooth vertical edges. Probably because it hasn’t been exposed to the Martian wind for a long time, relatively recently.It is “all very natural and resembles outcrops found in many dry places. Earth,” He said.
There is no mars
Studying geological data from Rover of curiosity and patience, Mangold agrees that the “doors” of Mars were naturally created by the rock structure.
“These are two-way fractures that create an” open box “with the appearance of a door. There is nothing artificial, “says Mangold.
Internet speculation has raised the possibility that a cave in the shape of a small door was caused by the “Mars” of the earthquake – Two of the largest Mars ever recordedFor example, it occurred in late 2021.
But Mangold is cool with the idea that “the whole mountain is so badly destroyed that we don’t need a big Martian earthquake.” Instead, the water pressure in the crack may have formed the crack before the rock was exposed. Or it could be the result of thermal stress caused by seasonal fluctuations in the temperature of the planet’s surface.
“Sure, this is a very beautiful outcrop,” said Angelo Pio Rossi, a geologist at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. Rossi created an outcrop panorama from a series of photographs from Curiosity Rover. He also believes that the door-shaped cave was created by the visible crevices in the rock.
Part of his job is to find similar geological structures on Earth that are found on Mars, and our planet has many similar structures here, he said.
And Marsquakes probably had little to do with it. “The crevice itself was not created directly by Mars, but simply by a transformation of the geological age,” he said.
Hodgkins adds that this image shows how useful a picture of a Mars rover can be. “This is a really good image. It shows what you can do with an image that comes back from curiosity and patience.”
Originally published on Live Science.
The “doorways” found on Mars are not for aliens. This is how it was actually formed.
Source link The “doorways” found on Mars are not for aliens. This is how it was actually formed.
