When we find life on another planet, we are sure it will be the biggest news of the millennium.
Could there be mushrooms on Mars? Faced with the release of a recent study in which an international team of scientists from countries like the US, France and China gathered and compared photographic evidence that they say shows mushroom-like objects growing on the red planet , the article It has spread like wildfire on social networks in the face of the “possible discovery of life on Mars.”
What is truth in this statement?
On Mars, most of Earth’s life would not survive; however, according to resistance tests that NASA researchers have conducted, some types of microbes, such as the black mold fungus, could survive on the surface of the Red Planet for a considerable period of time.
Does this mean that there could be living fungi on Mars? Some scientists think so, despite how dubious this possibility may seem . This theory is based on the observation of more than 40 images from NASA’s Opportunity and Curiosity rovers, as well as some taken by the HiRISE high-resolution camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Using red circles and arrows to highlight certain features, the study researchers point to a series of structures that closely resemble rocks, but also fungi.
These mushroom-like specimens, according to the scientists, also appeared on top of the rovers that took the images, suggesting that these “life forms” could grow on any surface, not just on Martian soil. The scientists say the objects in question show “chalky-white spherical-shaped specimens,” which the Mars Opportunity team initially said was a mineral called hematite.
The researchers claim that the Martian wind did not discover the amorphous spheres and that they “expand in size or, on the contrary, change shape, move to new locations and / or decrease in size and almost disappear.”
“Many of these spherical ground-level specimens also have stems or portions of their outer membranes have detached, possibly crustose, and are surrounded by white chunks and spongy spore-like material,” the experts continue.
Unfortunately, the article published in the journal Advances in Microbiology is part of the Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) portfolio, which has a long history of plagiarizing articles from other journals, so it is quite difficult to take its content seriously. .
In addition, these unusual claims have been met with skepticism by the scientific community, which cites an inaccurate methodology in the study and notes that detecting similarities in photographs cannot be exposed as evidence of life on Mars.
In the coming years (or decades), astronauts living on Mars could be the first to finally confirm that we are not alone in the universe ; but until then, we can only qualify as controversial this study, which NASA has not yet officially ruled on.
