Boston (dbTechno) - According to a series of new studies released on Wednesday, a massive asteroid slammed into Mars 4.4 billion years ago. The impact from the asteroid caused Mars to take its deformed shape it currently has today.
Three studies in total were released on Wednesday speaking about the asteroid and how it changed the red planet forever.
Mars is about half of the size of Earth, but when you look at its shape you realize that it has a very strange, split appearance to it.
The northern part of Mars appears extremely smooth, while the south is a whole different story.
Scientists have speculated in the past why Mars looks like this, with many blaming a volcano or something of that nature.
In one of the three studies, a team was led by Jeffrey Adnrews-Hanna from MIT.
They used gravity observation to remove any type of volcanic deposits. Once this was done, what they found was that there was an area where you could see an impact occured which stretched 6,600 miles.
The shape of the hole was smooth and elliptical according to the study.
They also managed to find low-altitude gravity measurements in the southern half of Mars, meaning that they found cracks there from the impact in the north.
Though this has yet to be fully proven, it could be true that Mars was hit the hardest in our solar system by an asteroid.
Francis Nimmo of the University of California-Santa Cruz led one of the studies in the journal Nature, and stated it was a bad day for Mars to say the least.
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