PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Pioneering research sheds new light on the origins and composition of planet Mars

Pioneering research sheds new light on the origins and composition of planet Mars
2023-04-24
(Press-News.org) A new study has uncovered intriguing insights into the liquid core at the centre of Mars, furthering understanding of the planet’s formation and evolution.

The research, led by the University of Bristol and published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, reveals the first-ever detections of sound waves travelling into the Martian core. Measurements from this acoustic energy, called seismic waves, indicate its liquid core is slightly denser and smaller than previously thought, and comprises a mixture of iron and numerous other elements.

The findings are all the more remarkable, as the research mission was initially only scheduled to last for a little over one Mars year (two Earth years). Despite Martian storms hastening the accumulation of dust and reducing power to the NASA InSight Mars lander, NASA extended its stay, so geophysical data, including signals of marsquakes, continued to be gathered until the end of last year.

Lead author Dr Jessica Irving, Senior Lecturer in Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, said: "The extra mission time certainly paid off. We’ve made the very first observations of seismic waves travelling through the core of Mars. Two seismic signals, one from a very distant marsquake and one from a meteorite impact on the far side of the planet, have allowed us to probe the Martian core with seismic waves. We’ve effectively been listening for energy travelling through the heart of another planet, and now we’ve heard it.

“These first measurements of the elastic properties of Mars’ core have helped us investigate its composition. Rather than being just a ball of iron, it also contains a large amount of sulfur, as well as other elements including a small amount of hydrogen.”

The team of researchers used data from NASA’s InSight lander, a robotic spacecraft designed to probe the interior of Mars, to compare seismic waves travelling through the planet’s core with those transiting Mars’ shallower regions, and modelled properties of its interior.

The InSight lander deployed a broadband seismometer on the Martian surface in 2018, allowing for the detection of seismic events, including marsquakes and meteorite impacts.  The multi-disciplinary team of scientists, including seismologists, geodynamicists and mineral physicists, used observations of two seismic events located in the opposite hemisphere from the seismometer to measure the travel times of seismic waves that passed through the core relative to seismic waves that remained in the mantle. 

Dr Irving said: “So-called ‘farside’ events, meaning those on the opposite side of the planet to InSight, are intrinsically harder to detect because a great deal of energy is lost or diverted away as waves travel through the planet. We needed both luck and skill to find, and then use, these events. We detected no farside events in the first Martian year of operations. If the mission had ended then, this research couldn’t have happened.

“The sol 976 marsquake was the most distant event found during the mission. The second farside event, S1000a – the first event detected on day 1,000 of operations – was particularly useful because it turned out to be a meteorite impact which we heard all the way through the planet, so we knew where the seismic signals came from. These events came after the Marsquake Service (MQS) had honed their skills on hundreds of days of Martian data; it then took a lot of seismological expertise from across the Insight Team to tease the signals out from the complex seismograms recorded by the lander.”  

The authors used these measurements to build models describing physical properties of the core, including its size and elastic wave-speed. The results suggested Mars’ core is slightly denser and smaller than previous estimates, with a radius of approximately 1,780–1,810 km. These findings are consistent with the core having a relatively high fraction of light elements alloyed with iron, including abundant sulfur and smaller amounts of oxygen, carbon and hydrogen.

Co-author Ved Lekic, Associate Professor of Geology at the University of Maryland College Park, in the US, said: “Detecting and understanding waves that travel through the very core of another planet is incredibly challenging, reflecting decades of efforts by hundreds of scientists and engineers from multiple countries. We not only had to utilise sophisticated seismic analysis techniques, but also deploy knowledge of how high pressures and temperatures affect properties of metal alloys, leveraging the expertise of the InSight Team.”

Dr Irving added: “The new results are important for understanding how Mars’ formation and evolution differ from those of Earth. New theories about the formation conditions and building blocks of the red planet will need to be able to match the core’s physical properties as revealed by this new study.”

Dr Jessica Irving and co-author Dr Anna Horleston, a seismologist from the University of Bristol, were supported with funding from the UK Space Agency.

Paper

‘First observations of core-transiting seismic phases on Mars’ by Jessica Irving et al in PNAS 

 

END

[Attachments] See images for this press release:
Pioneering research sheds new light on the origins and composition of planet Mars

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Testing antibiotic resistance with a fast, cheap, and easy method

Testing antibiotic resistance with a fast, cheap, and easy method
2023-04-24
“We have developed a technique in our laboratories that allows us to obtain an antibiogram within 2-4 hours – instead of the current 24 hours for the most common germs and one month for tuberculosis,” says Dr Sandor Kasas at EPFL. Professor Ronnie Willaert at Vrije Universiteit Brussel adds: “Our technique is not only faster but also simpler and much cheaper than all those existing now.” Antibiotic resistance happens when bacteria develop the ability to defeat the drugs designed to kill them. It ...

Interfering with antiviral pathway may deter Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia

2023-04-24
Targeting part of an antiviral pathway triggered by the accumulation of a key pathogen shared in Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia may one day offer a new therapeutic approach to deterring or delaying cognitive decline, according to preclinical research led by Weill Cornell Medicine scientists. The study, published April 24 in Nature Neuroscience, demonstrates that inhibiting an innate immune system enzyme called cyclic GMP–AMP synthase (cGAS) helps neurons become resilient to the build-up of the protein tau into bundles known as fibrils, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s and some forms of frontotemporal dementia, the two most ...

Outstanding performance of organic solar cell using tin oxide

Outstanding performance of organic solar cell using tin oxide
2023-04-24
Organic solar cells have a photoactive layer that is made from polymers and small molecules. The cells are very thin, can be flexible, and are easy to make. However, the efficiency of these cells is still much below that of conventional silicon-based ones. Applied physicists from the University of Groningen have now fabricated an organic solar cell with an efficiency of over 17 percent, which is in the top range for this type of material. It has the advantage of using an unusual device structure that is produced using a scalable technique. The design involves a conductive layer of tin oxide that is grown ...

Redox Medicine 2023: Where is the target?

Redox Medicine 2023: Where is the target?
2023-04-24
The 25th International Conference on Redox Medicine will take place on June 21-23 in Paris. Redox Medicine 2023 will provide a glimpse into the role of redox in tomorrow’s medicine. What to Expect in Redox Medicine 2023? Reactive oxygen species (ROS) have been studied for decades, but the results remain controversial. ROS are beneficial to biological mechanisms, acting as signaling molecules and enhancing immune defense. However, they also have harmful effects, such as causing tissue and organ damage. Dr. Carole Nicco, stated that “The work and results presented at the Redox Medicine Congress will give ...

Small acts of kindness are frequent and universal, study finds

2023-04-24
Key takeaways A study by researchers from UCLA, Australia, Ecuador, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. found that people around the world signal others for assistance every couple of minutes. The research, which examined behaviors in towns and rural areas in several different countries, revealed that people comply with these small requests for help far more often than they decline them. The findings suggest that people from all cultures have more similar cooperative behaviors than prior research has established. A new study by UCLA sociologist Giovanni Rossi and an international team of collaborators finds that people rely on ...

Department of Energy to support 999 outstanding undergraduate students and 79 faculty members from institutions underrepresented in the scientific research enterprise

2023-04-24
WASHINGTON, DC – The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science will sponsor the participation of 999 undergraduate students and 79 faculty members in three STEM-focused workforce development programs at 16 DOE national laboratories and a national fusion facility during summer 2023. Collectively, these programs ensure DOE and our nation have a strong, sustained workforce trained in the skills needed to address the energy, environment, and national security challenges of today and tomorrow. “Our future depends on the next generation ...

Metabolism: not the limiting factor in prokaryotic endosymbiosis

Metabolism: not the limiting factor in prokaryotic endosymbiosis
2023-04-24
“One of the great mysteries of biology,” says Eric Libby, former SFI Postdoctoral Fellow, now an associate professor at the Integrated Science Lab (IceLab), Umeå University in Sweden, “is eukaryogenesis, or how eukaryotes arose.” Scientists consider this to be a period of major evolutionary transition, critical to our understanding of the history and evolution of life on Earth.  In a new study published on April 21, 2023, in PNAS, Libby worked with SFI Professor Christopher Kempes and Jordan ...

Argonne names newest Maria Goeppert Mayer and Walter Massey Fellows

Argonne names newest Maria Goeppert Mayer and Walter Massey Fellows
2023-04-24
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has awarded its newest cohort of named fellowships, providing five early-career scientists with additional support as they pursue pivotal discoveries that will make Americans safer and better off and increase our understanding of the universe.   For 2023, the laboratory has named four Maria Goeppert Mayer Fellows and one Walter Massey Fellow. Maria Goeppert Mayer was a pioneering nuclear physicist who received the 1963 Nobel Prize in physics for discovering, at Argonne, the shell model of the atomic nucleus. Walter Massey ...

Generation of color-tunable high-performance LG laser beams via Janus OPO

Generation of color-tunable high-performance LG laser beams via Janus OPO
2023-04-24
Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) modes are a type of light wave that can carry the external torque of photons as they move through space. They are useful in many fields, from optical communications to super-resolution imaging. Advanced developments in these and other applications demand reliable and color-tunable LG mode laser sources, which do not yet exist. An optical parametric oscillator (OPO) is a device that can generate a wavelength-tunable laser beam, so it has been used to realize a color-tunable LG laser source — generally, in one of two ways. One way is to change a regular beam into an LG beam using a phase component ...

Webb reveals early-universe prequel to huge galaxy cluster

Webb reveals early-universe prequel to huge galaxy cluster
2023-04-24
Every giant was once a baby, though you may never have seen them at that stage of their development. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has begun to shed light on formative years in the history of the universe that have thus far been beyond reach: the formation and assembly of galaxies. For the first time, a protocluster of seven galaxies has been confirmed at a distance that astronomers refer to as redshift 7.9, or a mere 650 million years after the big bang. Based on the data collected, astronomers calculated the nascent cluster’s future development, finding that it will likely grow in size and mass to resemble the Coma Cluster, ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Underserved youth less likely to visit emergency department for concussion in Ontario, study finds

‘Molecular shield’ placed in the nose may soon treat common hay fever trigger

Beetles under climate stress lay larger male eggs: Wolbachia infection drives adaptive reproduction strategy in response to rising temperature and CO₂

Groundbreaking quantum study puts wave-particle duality to work

Weekly injection could be life changing for Parkinson’s patients

Toxic metals linked to impaired growth in infants in Guatemala

Being consistently physically active in adulthood linked to 30–40% lower risk of death

Nerve pain drug gabapentin linked to increased dementia, cognitive impairment risks

Children’s social care involvement common to nearly third of UK mums who died during perinatal period

‘Support, not judgement’: Study explores links between children’s social care involvement and maternal deaths

Ethnic minority and poorer children more likely to die in intensive care

Major progress in fertility preservation after treatment for cancer of the lymphatic system

Fewer complications after additional ultrasound in pregnant women who feel less fetal movement

Environmental impact of common pesticides seriously underestimated

The Milky Way could be teeming with more satellite galaxies than previously thought

New study reveals surprising reproductive secrets of a cricket-hunting parasitoid fly

Media Tip Sheet: Symposia at ESA2025

NSF CAREER Award will power UVA engineer’s research to improve drug purification

Tiny parasitoid flies show how early-life competition shapes adult success

New coating for glass promises energy-saving windows

Green spaces boost children’s cognitive skills and strengthen family well-being

Ancient trees dying faster than expected in Eastern Oregon

Study findings help hone precision of proven CVD risk tool

Most patients with advanced melanoma who received pre-surgical immunotherapy remain alive and disease free four years later

Introducing BioEmu: A generative AI Model that enables high-speed and accurate prediction of protein structural ensembles

Replacing mutated microglia with healthy microglia halts progression of genetic neurological disease in mice and humans

New research shows how tropical plants manage rival insect tenants by giving them separate ‘flats’

Condo-style living helps keep the peace inside these ant plants

Climate change action could dramatically limit rising UK heatwave deaths

Annual heat-related deaths projected to increase significantly due to climate and population change

[Press-News.org] Pioneering research sheds new light on the origins and composition of planet Mars