A new study might answer one of Mars' most compelling mysteries: How did it lose its protective magnetic shield? It may have a strange core.
Mars is a parched planet ruled by global dust storms. It’s also a frigid world, where night-time winter temperatures fall to -140 C at the poles. But it wasn’t always a dry, barren, freezing, inhospitable wasteland. It used to be a warm, wet, almost inviting place, where liquid water flowed across the surface, filling up lakes, carving channels, and leaving sediment deltas.
The magnetosphere swaddles Earth like a protective blanket. The Sun’s solar wind strikes the magnetosphere, and the magnetosphere forces it to flow around the planet instead of reaching the atmosphere or the surface. The magnetosphere isn’t a sphere: the solar wind moves the magnetosphere into an asymmetrical shape. The magnetosphere prevents the solar wind from stripping away Earth’s atmosphere. Without it, Earth would be dry, dead, and barren, just like Mars.
But if data from InSight is correct, the hydrogen in the Fe-S-H core might play a role in the collapse of Mars’ magnetic field. The experiment’s results center on the idea of miscibility. When materials are added together and create a homogenous mixture, they’re miscible. When materials are added together and don’t make a homogenous mixture, they’re immiscible. Fe-S-H’s immiscibility at high temperatures and pressures played a significant role in Martian planetary history.
This figure from the paper shows how Mars’ core and Earth’s core started similarly, then changed over time. Light- and dark-blue represent buoyant and dense liquids, respectively. The Martian core became immiscible from the center out, leading to stratification and cessation of convection. Without convection, there’s no magnetic shield. Earth’s core is different than Mars’. The liquid core’s immiscibility created stratification on the outer layers, while the inner layers remained liquid.
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