Amazing discovery of 4.5 billion year old alien ocean of life

Cosmic treasures accidentally sent to Earth by another planet have revealed an ocean at least 300m deep, existing 4.5 billion years ago and teeming with the building blocks of life.

To come to that discovery, the research team led by Professor Martin Bizzarro from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) analyzed chromium isotopes in many Martian meteorites , which led them back 4.5 billion years to the past when the planet was young.

"At that time, Mars was bombarded by ice-filled asteroids. This happened during the first 100 million years of the planet's evolution. In addition to water, these icy asteroids also brought biologically relevant molecules such as amino acids to Mars ," Sci-News quoted Professor Bizzarro as saying.

Mars' oceans may have been more suitable for the evolution of life than Earth's - (Photo: NASA).

In the new study, they built a model of Mars's turbulent past, suggesting the existence of a planet-spanning ocean , identical to Earth's early ocean. The ocean was at least 300m deep, and possibly as deep as 1km in some spots.

The ocean is also filled with the building blocks of life, as amino acids are used to make DNA and RNA.

At the same time, Earth's oceans were also forming, but the evidence suggests they contained far less water than those on Mars. Not to mention that while the building blocks of life evolved peacefully on Mars, they were nearly wiped out on Earth by a catastrophic collision with Theia, a Mars-sized body that has now merged with our own.

But as other studies have shown, the catastrophes that could have caused the complete extinction of Martian life occurred much later, such as the near-total evaporation of water about 3 billion years ago.

The discovery not only provides evidence of a planet that could have been teeming with life next door, but also sheds light on Earth's own past, how oceans formed and life was seeded.

Because what we know about the Earth in its earliest years is only theoretical. Unlike Mars with its quiet crust, the Earth's crust is made up of many pieces - tectonic plates - that are constantly moving and completely erase the first 500 million years of history.

The study was recently published in the scientific journal Science Advances.