ROCK STRUCTURERS MAY NOT INDICATE ANCIENT LIFE ON MARS, STUDY SAYS

Tue, 8 Oct 1996
Source: AP
NEW YORK (AP) -- Ancient layers of rock that have been taken as evidence of life existing as long as 3.5 billion years ago may not indicate life after all, a study says.

There's other evidence of life that long ago, so the new finding doesn't challenge that idea.

At issue are stromatolites, layered rock structures that can form through the actions of bacteria. Scientists have assumed that the oldest stromatolites were evidence of ancient microorganisms.

In the Oct. 3 issue of the journal Nature, John Grotzinger and Daniel Rothman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyze the structure of some 1.9 billion-year-old stromatolites and conclude they could have formed without any help from microbes. So at least some, and maybe many, stromatolites may have formed without any requirement for life, they said.

Andrew Knoll, a Harvard biologist, said skepticism over assuming that the oldest stromatolites meant life has been growing over the past decade.

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Scientists Strengthen Evidence for Black Hole at Center of Galaxy

NEW YORK (AP) -- A study of how 39 stars are moving near the center of the Milky Way galaxy has strengthened the evidence for a black hole there.

Past studies of these close-in stars has measured their speed along the line of sight to Earth, and they have given evidence for a central black hole. The new study measured their velocity perpendicular to the line of sight; in other words, across the sky as seen from Earth.

It basically shows that the earlier studies were right in key assumptions about how such stars were orbiting. And it provides evidence for a black hole about 2.5 million times as massive as the sun.

The work is reported in the Oct. 3 issue of the journal Nature by scientists at the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics near Munich, Germany.

End advance for Monday, Oct. 7

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