Researchers studying the geographical composition of Mars have come to realize the Red Planet is far more complex than previously thought. A new study provides strong evidence that granite exists on Mars, and even goes so far as to attempt to explain how it got there.

"We're providing the most compelling evidence to date that Mars has granitic rocks," said James Wray, an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Many scientists have held the belief that Mars is geographically simple compared to Earth, that the planet was composed mostly of one rock. Evidence against this started piling up once NASA's Mars Curiosity rover discovered traces of granite in Martian soil. Some dismissed the findings as nothing more than an isolated case due to there being no traces of granite elsewhere, but others decided to look further.

An in-depth study of one of Mars' volcanoes was launched, and with the help of infrared spectroscopy, experts were able to detect feldspar, a mineral found in granite.

"Using the kind of infrared spectroscopic technique we were using, you shouldn't really be able to detect feldspar minerals, unless there's really, really a lot of feldspar and very little of the dark minerals that you get in basalt," Wray said.

"We think some of the volcanoes on Mars were sporadically active for billions of years. It seems plausible that in a volcano you could get enough iterations of that reprocessing that you could form something like granite."

You can read the full published study detailing the findings in the journal Nature Geoscience.