Yes, we have heard all about the possibility of Mars having bodies of water before, ever since they spotted what resembles to be two shorelines on Mars surface. The idea was debunked when scientists thought that the "shorelines" were too hilly to be considered as ocean beds.

However, they have discovered something that would explain how the shorelines came about: Mars' unstable spin.

And how would an unstable spin explain the bumpy surface? Even heavenly bodies obey the Laws of Physics, so when a planet spins, the heaviest things - which includes vast bodies of water - shift toward the center, or in this case the equator.

More than a billion years ago, something happened in the way mass was distributed on Mars that caused the Martian ocean beds to change shape and warp. Taylor Perron of UC Berkeley is excited about this discovery. "We found evidence of the path the shift would have to have occurred, and it matches with the deformation of the shorelines," he said.

The surface of the planet near the equator is in a flattened bulge as a result of pressure brought about by centripetal forces, but the surface beyond the equator becomes deformed, with hilly elevations of rock as they get pushed towards the north.

The rock deformation, which behaves in a predictable manner, turns out to be the key that helped Perron and the rest of the planetary research team find the ocean shorelines.

"This really confirms that there was an ocean on Mars," said Mark Richards, a planetary scientist at the University of California at Berkeley and co-author of the study, which is detailed in the June 14 issue of the journal "Nature".