Currently, Mars is a planet with a high probability of being sterile. Its temperature is extreme, it does not have bodies of liquid water or a dense atmosphere that contains gases such as oxygen, and it is completely exposed to solar radiation. However, decades of studies of its surface have provided evidence that the planet once had everything necessary to be habitable by basic forms of life. “Something” happened to the red planet that transformed it into the strange desert it is now. Science suspects that disappearance of its magnetic field can explain your current circumstances.
Understanding the absence of Mars’ magnetic field is one of the key questions for future space colonization aspirations. The planet is approximately 4.6 billion years old, nearly the same age as Earth, but its magnetic field must have remained in place for only a small portion of that time. The most accepted estimate is that it enigmatically disappeared 4.1 billion years ago.
New research from Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences has given a couple hundred million years more life to the Mars dynamo. The report published in Nature Communications It states that the planet’s magnetic field would have survived until about 3.9 billion years ago. This represents an increase in the 200 million year habitable band or a protective shield that accompanied it for approximately 15% of its current age.
Paleomagnetism on Mars
The researchers’ work consisted of a supercomputer simulation of cooling and magnetization cycles of giant craters on the planet’s surface. The Harvard team employed basic principles of paleomagnetism, a branch of science that studies records of magnetic fields imbued in minerals. In this way, it was possible to obtain a new approximation to the age of Mars’ magnetic field.
Studies on Earth have revealed that the magnetic field occurs due to the convection of a liquid core composed of iron and nickel. In the solar system, Jupiter has the strongest magnetic field. Saturn, Neptune and Mercury have theirs, although it is considerably weaker. Uranus’s is unusual and tilted. As for the moons, there is only one that has this protective shield against solar radiation: Ganymede.
There is previous work that suggests that Mars’ magnetic field remained for longer than scientifically accepted. In 2023, some of the same researchers inferred the age of the shield with the help of a Martian crater and a diamond quantum microscope. With the recent work from Harvard, more evidence is added to affirm that habitable conditions on Mars did not disappear so early.
“We are trying to answer primary and important questions about how everything came to be the way it is, including why the entire solar system is the way it is. Planetary magnetic fields are our best tool for answering many of those questions, and one of the only ways we can learn about the deep interior and early history of planets,” concluded Sarah Steele, one of the authors of the new study.
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