Scientists think they’ve discovered the cause of the largest seismic event ever recorded on Mars – -.

Last year, NASA’s InSight lander recorded an earthquake measuring 4.7 on the Richter scale that reverberated across the planet Mars for a period of six hours. At the time, because it was the largest seismic event ever recorded on the Red Planet, scientists assumed the earthquake was caused by a meteorite impact, but this has since been debunked.

An Oxford University study determined that the earthquake could not have been caused by a meteorite because no new craters were found on the planet’s surface. This has since led to the theory that the earthquake was caused by the stress of cooling and shrinking different parts of the planet at different speeds, effectively cracking the entire planet.

This is now the leading hypothesis regarding the earthquake because scientists do not believe that Mars has active plate tectonics that would cause an earthquake such as we often feel on Earth.

Thanks, Sky News.