Mars has two moon called Phobos and Deimos , named after the Grecian mythological personifications of apprehensiveness and fear . They are odd moons . They are minuscule and a minute misshapen . Their sizing , grayish people of color , and strange form make them look like asteroids , so astronomer have sham them to be exactly that , captured by Mars . Now , a unexampled study supply clean grounds against this idea .
research worker have re - dissect former observations of Phobos and found evidence suggesting that its physical composition is very similar to the Martian crust . For this understanding , they suggest that Phobos and Deimos are the results of a serious collision on the Red Planet that threw into cranial orbit enough material to form the two moons . The results are published in theJournal of Geophysical Research : Planets .
The team investigated Phobos using a 20 - year - previous dataset . They grow a chemical fingerprint of the moon ’s regolith , the layer of slack terrain on its surface . Data on Phobos have always matched up with observance of asteroids , but the team wanted to carry a more elaborated analysis . They compare the data with a meteorite that strike down to Earth in the year 2000 . It ’s supposed to be a upright representative of the asteroids that Phobos looks like and the fact it set down on our major planet means we can get some detailed entropy about its musical composition . It turn out that Phobos and the meteorite are quite unlike each other .
“ We found , at these wavelength ranges , the Tagish Lake meteorite does n’t look anything like Phobos , and in fact what equal Phobos most closely , or at least one of the features in the spectrum , is ground - up basalt , which is a common volcanic rock , and it ’s what most of the Martian insolence is made out of , ” lead author Tim Glotch , from Stony Brook University , said in astatement . “ That leads us to believe that perhaps Phobos might be a remnant of an impact that happen ahead of time on in Martian history . ”
This is not the first timethis ideahas been propose . Other clues suggest that the origin of the two moons is close to home plate than thought . Phobos ’ compass , for representative , has certain features such as its inclinations that contrive dubiety on the hypothesis that it was capture .
“ The issue of the origins of Phobos and Deimos is a fun kind of mystery , because we have two competing hypotheses that can not both be truthful , ” bestow Marc Fries , a planetary scientist from NASA ’s Johnson Space Center who was not involved in the study . “ I would not consider this to be a final solution to the mystery of the moonshine ’ origin , but it will help keep the treatment moving forward . ”
It might not be a final solution , but the captured scenario now seems even more improbable thanks to this new work .
