Mars's Small Mass Continues to Baffle Planetary Scientists

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We create a news channel fully dedicated to the fastest information from the world. Your news on every topic and without secrets. We deal with politics, but also science, entertainment and the world of Stars. If you are looking for information about politicians you have come to the right place. If you are looking for mysteries, secrets and curiosities about celebrities and politicians, it's good that you are here.

The latest news and information, as well as news from around the world and Poland regarding technology, science and health. Are you looking for equipment reviews, opinions of other people? You will find out information about phones, tablets and others. Everything you need to know about Artificial Intelligence, i.e. AI, as well as Tesla and SpaxeX. Mars remains an enigma for scientists, not necessarily due to the well-known debates about its past water, oceans, or potential for life, but rather because of its surprisingly small mass when compared to Earth and Venus. This discrepancy has puzzled planetary scientists for decades.

The Red Planet's mass is only about one tenth that of Earth, a fact that led Carnegie Institution planetary scientist George Wetherill to call it the “small Mars” problem. Several hypotheses have been put forward to explain why Mars is so much smaller than its two planetary neighbors, yet few scientists are truly confident in any of them.

According to Matthew Clement, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab, if there was enough material in the protoplanetary disk to form planets the size of Earth and Venus, it’s unclear why a similar amount of material wasn't also near Mars, allowing it to grow to a similar size.

The question remains: is Mars's small mass the key to why it could not retain water and ultimately became uninhabitable?

Sean Raymond, an astrophysicist at the Bordeaux Astrophysical Laboratory, stated that mass is the most fundamental property of a planet. Mars's geological history and its loss of water are largely a consequence of its mass.

Stephen Kane, a planetary geophysicist at the University of California, Riverside, also pointed out that alongside its distance from the Sun, Mars's small size significantly limited the longevity of its geological and volcanic activity, which would have replenished its atmosphere. Furthermore, its small mass made it vulnerable to atmospheric stripping by the solar wind.

Mars reached half of its present mass very early in the history of the Solar System. According to Clement, whatever caused the size difference between these planets must have happened very early, probably within the first few million years of the solar system’s existence.

There are three primary hypotheses attempting to explain the mass difference:

The Grand Tack Model: This model proposes that the young Jupiter migrated inward towards the Sun before reversing direction. This migration would have disrupted the planetary building blocks that could have allowed Mars to grow larger. Without Jupiter’s migration, Mars might have been the size of Earth or Venus, or even larger, according to Kane.

The Low-Mass Main Asteroid Belt Model: This model suggests that there was very little material available near Mars for it to grow to a larger size.

The Early Instability Model: This theory posits that the early inner solar system was a chaotic environment, where the building blocks for rocky planets beyond Earth and Venus were so disturbed that they could not coalesce into anything larger than Mars.

It is likely that each of these hypotheses played a role in keeping Mars small. However, further exploration of the Solar System’s Main Asteroid Belt will be necessary to identify which hypothesis has the most validity.

Understanding the cause of Mars’s small size is vital, Clement notes, because the inner solar system contains four extremely different planets and we still don't understand why. He questions whether something went wrong for Mars, or did something unique occur for the Earth?

Raymond believes Mars’s small mass is simply a byproduct of how the Solar System transformed dust into planets. Further research into this process, using both modeling and observations of dust around young stars where planetesimals are forming, may hold the answer.

Finally, according to Kane, our solar system’s architecture is unusual, with only about ten percent of solar type stars having a cold Jupiter. Therefore, it is plausible that most solar systems may support the formation of numerous Earth and Venus-sized planets, which is good news for astrobiology, as giant planets are relatively rare.

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