THE LOST WORLD

Wreckage from a mysterious planet spotted orbiting Mars

Scientists glimpse space rocks which could be the remains of an alien world that vanished billions of years ago

    

Alamy   

Mars is haunted by the wreckage of an ancient planet which mysteriously vanished billions of years ago

THE wreckage from an ancient lost planet may have been spotted circling Mars.

Scientists believe a handful of small asteroids, called the Trojans, are likely to have belonged to a planet which mysteriously vanished from our solar system.

Using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, a group of international scientists found that the Trojans were made up of the same material – suggesting they once belonged to the same planet.
Trojans have been around since the birth of the solar system, when the distribution of planets, asteroids and comets was very different from today.
About 6,000 Trojans have been found in the orbit of Jupiter and about 10 in Neptune’s.

Apostolas Christou    

A diagram shows how the asteroids follow a similar orbit to Mars. The filled disks indicate the relative sizes of the asteroids. Eureka, the largest member, is about 2 km across

  

              

     

     

       

Mars is so far the only terrestrial planet known to have Trojan companions which orbit regularly.
The first Mars Trojan was discovered more than 25 years ago at L5 and named “Eureka” in reference to the famous exclamation by Ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes.
It has nine of these satellites, but they all have a mysteriously different structure to every other space rock in the solar system.
The asteroids are made up of olivine, which is a mineral that forms in larger objects that suffered super high pressures and temperatures.

  

This diagram shows how Mars might once have looked very similar to Earth

The scientists, lead by Apostolos Christou and Galin Borisov at the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium in Northern Ireland, claim this is evidence that the rocks are the remains of a lost planet.
The ancient world could even have impacted on our own civilisation, Christou revealed.
He said: “Our findings suggest that such material has participated in the formation of Mars and perhaps its planetary neighbour, our own Earth.”
It follows a new bombshell theory that life on Mars may have been forced underground after a catastrophic disaster turned the Red Planet into a “frigid desert”.
(The Sun, UK)

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