Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – Researchers find Mars experiencing an earthquake and there is a mysterious rumbling sound. According to them, this is an ongoing volcanic activity.
“Knowing if the mantle of Mars is still active is very important for us to understand how Mars evolved as a planet,” said geophysicist at the Australian National University, Hrvoje Tkalci. Science AlertWednesday (6/4/2022).
“This could help answer fundamental questions about the Solar System and the state of the Martian core, as well as evolution that currently doesn’t exist.”
Previously for a long time, researchers believed there was not much activity on Mars. The planet is also known to have a slight magnetic field.
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Photo: Illustration of the planet Mars. (DasWortgewand/Pixabay)- – |
“All life on Earth is possible because of Earth’s magnetic field and its ability to protect us from cosmic radiation, so without a magnetic field life as we know it would not be possible,” he said.
But this is different when NASA Insight arrived in November 2018 and heard a rumbling sound inside the planet, and detected hundreds of Martian earthquakes and provided enough detailed maps of the Martian interior. Tkalcic and fellow geophysicist Weijia Sun of the Chinese Academy of Sciences wanted to search for earthquakes that missed Insight.
Both used two conventional techniques and from nine known earthquake patterns, they detected 47 recent seismic events.
All of them come from the Cerberus Fossae region of Mars. Most were similar in shape to the two quakes that occurred in May and June 2019, suggesting the smaller quake was related to the larger one.
“We found that marsquakes (earthquakes that occur on Mars) repeatedly occur throughout the day on Mars, whereas Marsquakes detected and reported by NASA in the past appear to only occur at midnight when the planet is calmer,” said Tkalci.
“We can therefore assume that the movement of molten rock in the Martian mantle was the trigger for the 47 newly detected Martian earthquakes beneath the Cerberus Fossae region.”
(npb/roy)
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