A NASA satellite near the planet Mars in October 2016 -

NASA / Shutterstock / SIPA

Italian researchers have confirmed the presence of a huge underground lake spotted two years ago on Mars, but they also discovered that this body of water in liquid form was not alone.

As they had stated in August 2018 in

Science

thanks to radar data from the Mars Express probe, the specialists were able to verify that the main lake extends over a length of 20 km and a depth of less than one meter.

For their work published this Monday in

Nature

, the planetologists used a new method.

Experts have thus detected several smaller lakes separated by strips of non-submerged land.

These are located about 1.5 km below the surface of Mars in a region of the South Pole of the Red Planet, called Planum Australe.

“This means that this is not a classic, isolated discovery but a system.

And that changes things, ”comments Elena Pettinelli, from the University of Rome 3, co-author of the study cited by

IFL Science

.

Under the south pole of Mars there is a complex system of liquid ponds around the bigger lake area that was detected in 2018. This underground lake region probably contains salty brines.

Lauro, Pettinelli, et al .: https://t.co/PE3X2UMoPE pic.twitter.com/1RSTrtix2u

- Nature Astronomy (@NatureAstronomy) September 28, 2020

More data studied

These bodies of water have a particularly low temperature, evaluated at -68 ° C.

Planetologists are therefore asking how water can remain in its liquid form without sufficient pressure from the ice covering it, such as around the Earth's poles.

They therefore estimate that the lakes could have a high concentration of salt, explaining the phenomenon.

Where they had used twenty-nine different observations of the radar in 2018, the researchers this time relied on 134 data from the device covering an area of ​​250 by 300 kilometers.

The Italians have also applied methods usually reserved for underground frozen lakes present in Antarctica and Greenland.

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