Martian Rock Found In Morocco

daeley writes "The BBC is reporting that a rock found in 2001 in Morocco is originally from Mars, similar in composition to the 1977 Antartica find. 'The meteorite would have been blasted off the Red Planet by an impact and may hold clues to Mars' watery past... scientists say the fragments are magmatic rocks. Magmatism is the main process by which water moves from the core of planets to their surface.'"

Comments

Re:water at the core? Ummm, no.

[adlai]

Yeah, I saw the "magmatism is the main process by which water moves from the core of planets to their surface" thing and coughed quietly to myself *cough* *cough*.

Core differentiation generally happens REALLY early in planet's history, and it seems to me that it isn't precisely correct to say magmatism in this context, (which implies "volcanism" at least to me). Bouyancy and heat are what really moves water to the surface, since it is a) much less dense than rock (think about it) and b) not real stable at real high T.

In other words -- what moves water around is a whole mess of ugly chemistry and thermodynamics that I'll leave to my petrologist buddies to explain to me (dah? dah!) with odd pentagonal diagrams.

Re:A rock found in my backyard

[Tablizer]

Perhaps you mean another, now defunct, Sun. Ours is still made of Hydrogen.

Almost every piece of matter on Earth came from defunct Suns (stars) what exploded at the end of their lives. The very monitor you are staring at is left-over star boom boom. It is suspected that heavy elements like gold came from supernovas or hypernovas, really big stars with really big booms, the kind that can outshine entire galaxies for a few days or weeks. So next time you see a gold ring, realize that it came from the largest kind of explosions known in the entire universe. Booms beyond human comprehension.