Mars: Researchers Find Additional Evidence Red Planet Once Supported Alien Life

In recent years, Mars has found itself in the spotlight of astronomers located around the world. Elon Musk has said he hopes to get SpaceX to the Red Planet sooner rather than later, and NASA has a number of remote missions underway on the planet. Most recently, researchers from Penn State University claim they've found evidence an ancient ocean once existed on the planet, meaning the chance for life—even at a microbial level—having ever lived on the planet has grown substantial.

Using recently released topography maps of the planet, a team lead by geosciences professor Benjamin Cardenas have found a shoreline roughly 3.5 billion years old.

"What immediately comes to mind as one the most significant points here is that the existence of an ocean of this size means a higher potential for life," Cardenas said in the study, recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. "It also tells us about the ancient climate and its evolution. Based on these findings, we know there had to have been a period when it was warm enough and the atmosphere was thick enough to support this much liquid water at one time."

The maps show the ocean in question covered "hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, making it a sizable discovery.

"The big, novel thing that we did in this paper was think about Mars in terms of its stratigraphy and its sedimentary record," Cardenas said. "On Earth, we chart the history of waterways by looking at sediment that is deposited over time. We call that stratigraphy, the idea that water transports sediment and you can measure the changes on Earth by understanding the way that sediment piles up. That's what we've done here — but it's Mars."

Cardenas co-wrote the paper with Michael P. Lamb, professor of geology at Caltech. NASA funded the research. You can read more about the study here.