NEWS: Signs of ancient microbial life on the planet Mars #space #astronomy #nasa #science #shorts

Breaking space news, NASA just had a press conference and they said this.

Did we get this right? Do we think this is signs of ancient life on Mars? And after a year of review, they've come back and they said, listen, we can't find another explanation. So this very well could be the clearest sign of life that we've ever found on Mars.

This image was taken by the Perseverance rover on Mars and released by NASA last year, and this rock is now the best evidence we've ever had for ancient life on Mars. This is the area where the rover is on Mars, and it very obviously had running water in the past. And the rover took a sample of this rock and found that it contains organic compounds. If you zoom in, you can see these white polka dots surrounded by black rings.

These contain iron and phosphate. We've never seen this on Mars, but we have seen this on Earth when there's a fossilized record of microbes living in the subsurface. The spots on the rock could have been left behind byrobial life if it had used the raw ingredients, the organic carbon, the sulfur, and the phosphorus that we see on the rock as an energy source.

There are ways to produce these spots without biological reactions, things like sustained high temperatures, acidic conditions, and binding organic compounds, but there's no evidence of any of that happening here. This is what this area looked like. So this specific rock in an ancient river valley has organic

matter and crystallized magma right here and an energy source for microbes. So it's becoming not only possible but increasingly likely that this is the it's becoming not only possible but increasingly likely that this is the first evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars.