{"id":199951,"date":"2024-11-22T03:22:41","date_gmt":"2024-11-22T09:22:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/11\/mars-may-have-been-habitable-much-more-recently-than-thought"},"modified":"2024-11-22T03:22:41","modified_gmt":"2024-11-22T09:22:41","slug":"mars-may-have-been-habitable-much-more-recently-than-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/11\/mars-may-have-been-habitable-much-more-recently-than-thought","title":{"rendered":"Mars may have been Habitable much more recently than thought"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/mars-may-have-been-habitable-much-more-recently-than-thought3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Evidence suggests Mars could very well have been teeming with life billions of years ago. Now cold, dry, and stripped of what was once a potentially protective magnetic field, the red planet is a kind of forensic scene for scientists investigating whether Mars was indeed once habitable, and if so, when.<\/p>\n<p>The \u201cwhen\u201d question in particular has driven researchers in Harvard\u2019s Paleomagnetics Lab in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. A new paper in Nature Communications makes their most compelling case to date that Mars\u2019 life-enabling magnetic field could have survived until about 3.9 billion years ago, compared with previous estimates of 4.1 billion years\u2014so hundreds of millions of years more recently.<\/p>\n<p>The study was led by Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student Sarah Steele, who has used simulation and computer modeling to estimate the age of the Martian \u201cdynamo,\u201d or global magnetic field produced by convection in the planet\u2019s iron core, like on Earth. Together with senior author Roger Fu, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences, the team has doubled down on a theory they first argued last year that the Martian dynamo, capable of deflecting harmful cosmic rays, was around longer than prevailing estimates claim.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Evidence suggests Mars could very well have been teeming with life billions of years ago. Now cold, dry, and stripped of what was once a potentially protective magnetic field, the red planet is a kind of forensic scene for scientists investigating whether Mars was indeed once habitable, and if so, when. The \u201cwhen\u201d question in [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":707,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199951\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}