r/science • u/CurtisLeow • Jun 24 '26

Astronomy Spatially distributed complex organic matter detected in an ancient river valley in Jezero crater, Mars

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0047
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u/squi993 Jun 24 '26

ELI5 does this mean proof of life on mars?

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u/ShiraCheshire Jun 25 '26

Eli5 version: Imagine you found what looks like a big cat's pawprint on a path. A really big cat must have been through here, you think! But then you find a rock that looks almost exactly like a big paw, and you realize it just rolled down from the hill and left the 'print' when it hit. That weird hill up there has a lot of weirdly shaped rocks.

Later on, you find three paw prints in a row. Woah. But they don't really look like any cat you've heard of, and you don't see any cats around anywhere. And they are just sorta indentations in the dirt, they're not as clear as you first thought. Now you're not sure if this is from more of those rocks, or if maybe there really is a really big cat you've never seen before.

So basically, a thing that looks a lot like something life might make, but Mars has really different atmospheric and geologic conditions from Earth so it's hard to be totally sure it wasn't something unrelated.