Habitable planet appeared next to Earth, but met with disaster

Scientists have found a possible explanation for how a mass extinction occurred on a planet that NASA, ESA and many other space agencies believe must have life.

While we are facing climate disasters due to global warming; on another planet, entire species may have perished as the globe became too cold to live, also due to climate change.

It's a planet also in the Solar System, also neatly in the Goldilocks "habitable zone ," also a rocky planet like Earth: Mars.

Mars - (Photo: SPACE)

A study recently published in Nature Astronomy not only confirms the hypothesis of life existing on Mars that space agencies and many researchers around the world believe in, but also explains how this life became invisible to us.

As some previous studies have suggested, Mars began to have life just a little after Earth nearly 4 billion years ago. Their early creatures were also microorganisms like our planet, but they specialized in eating hydrogen (a powerful greenhouse gas) and releasing methane (also a greenhouse gas but less powerful than hydrogen.

Modeling how life arose and evolved on Mars using data from the Mars rover Curiosity, which helped NASA find traces of methane and the first building blocks of life, scientists have reconstructed the ancient history of Mars.

They found that life could not sustain itself in all the favorable environments that helped it emerge, and that it could easily wipe itself out by destroying the foundation on which it existed.

"The ingredients for life are everywhere in the universe. So life may appear very often, but its inability to maintain habitable conditions on the planet's surface makes it go extinct quickly. Our experiments show that even a biosphere can have a completely self-destructive effect," astrobiologist Boris Sauterey from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, told Space.

Summarizing the study, Science Alert said the work explained that because Mars is farther from the Sun than Earth, for life to exist, it needs a thick and strong enough layer of greenhouse gas to keep it warm, in this case hydrogen.

But as life evolved into a true biosphere, constantly devouring hydrogen and replacing it with methane, the planet's heat-retaining layer was no longer strong enough, causing temperatures to drop from 10-20 degrees Celsius to minus 57 degrees Celsius.

It was a climate catastrophe of global proportions, leaving the planet's surface firmly in a dead world.

The microbes have managed to burrow underground, perhaps as deep as a kilometer, in search of warmer environments. They may have survived for a while. There is also a small chance that they may still be alive, and the silver lining is the current traces of methane that Curiosity has found. Methane is most likely a byproduct of life.