The famous meteorite “Black Beauty” has been proven to originate from a place that may have supported life before Earth did.
Researchers from Curtin University in Australia have employed new techniques to analyze Meteorite Black Beauty, a space rock that traveled from Mars to Earth. They have uncovered evidence suggesting that the early red planet likely had conditions suitable for life.
About 4.45 billion years ago, our Earth was in the early stages of the Hadean Eon, still a “hellish” sphere covered by a magma ocean.
However, the environment on Mars at that time could have been entirely different: The 4.45 billion-year-old zircon grains within Black Beauty indicate that its homeland was a warm, potentially habitable area.
Meteorite Black Beauty has been shared with numerous research teams worldwide – (Photo: NASA).
Using nano-scale geochemical analysis methods, Australian researchers identified geochemical signatures of water-rich fluids and elemental evidence of hydrothermal systems.
Hydrothermal systems are crack-like structures on the ocean floor where water gets heated and nutrient-rich through geothermal processes.
Many studies suggest that hydrothermal systems are the cradle of life on planets, including Earth.
Dr. Aaron Cavosie from the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Curtin University, a co-author of the study, explained that this discovery sheds light on how ancient volcanic activities on Mars created an environment potentially conducive to life very early on.
Previously, there was some evidence from the pre-Noachian period on Mars—dating back more than 4.1 billion years—that indicated the presence of liquid water on the planet.
The new findings from Black Beauty suggest that conditions suitable for life on the red planet may have existed even earlier than anticipated. This is not far-fetched.
Mars is one of the three planets in our solar system’s “Goldilocks zone”, alongside Earth and Venus.
Although unfortunate events have turned Mars into a barren sphere today, many scientists believe that this world may have once harbored life.
This hypothesis is further supported by the Curiosity rover’s discovery of the first “building blocks of life” on Mars in 2018, followed by a series of intriguing evidence.
Black Beauty, known in Vietnamese as “Người Đẹp Đen,” carries the designation NWA 7034 in NASA’s records, landing in the Sahara Desert in 2011 after billions of years of travel. This meteorite has become one of the world’s top scientific treasures after NASA’s analyses confirmed that it originated from Mars, is 4.45 billion years old, and contains ten times more water than other Mars meteorites. |
