--------
Over the past couple of years, as vast amounts of scientific data on the Red Planet became available to research groups, scientists were overjoyed at noticing traces of methane on the surface of our neighbor. This was important because it implied biological sources â€" such as decomposing organisms â€" could have emitted it, and therefore the chances of finding it increased. However, just like everyone was in a frenzy on finding life, a new study comes to show that the enthusiasm may have been misplaced. It also shows that the gas is behaving in ways that are not associable with a biological origin. The new research sheds a lot of question marks on the assertion that Mars was inhabited in the past, or that it may still be so now. In the paper, published today in the respected scientific journal Nature, scientists argue that the methane in the Martian atmosphere may have other possible explanations. The main objection to the growing optimism states that the methane concentra!
tions thus far discovered are almost entirely distributed over a single region on the planet. Researchers say that, regardless of the source of the gas, it should have spread more uniformly throughout the atmosphere by now, as any gas would. The investigation was led by chemists Franck Lefavre and Francois Forget, both from Universite Pi...
--------
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Study-Reduces-Chances-of-Life-on-Mars-118526.shtml
This e-mail was sent by Experiment23 Inc., located in New York, NY
10163. To not receive further e-mails, please visit
http://help.pingie.com
No comments:
Post a Comment