They recreated Martian dust in a lab to test the theory, in a study published in Nature.
It isn’t because aliens spray-painted it… presumably Mars has been known as the Red Planet for thousands of years; even the ancient Egyptians called it ‘The Red One’ . Now scientists think they have worked out exactly what gives our closest planetary neighbour its rusty hue, and they’ve even made a copy of the Martian dust in a lab. A study published in Nature today says that the iron oxide could be a different mineral to the one most commonly presumed.
‘We’re not the first to consider ferrihydrite as the reason for why Mars is red, but it has never been proven the way we proved it now using observational data and novel laboratory methods to essentially make a Martian dust in the lab.’ To test their theory, they tried to recreate the dust by grinding particles to just one hundredth of the width of a human hair, given that on Mars it is very small in size.
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