Where did Earth's Water Originate? Solar Nebula, Study Suggests | Smart News

Scientists have long arrived on our planet via ice-filled comets and asteroids, but new research has been identified as an additional point of origin for the life-sustaining liquid: solar nebula, or clouds of gas, and dust lingering in the universe following the sun's training.

The chemical formula behind water is deceptively simple. Take two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, then combine into a molecule bearing a distinct resemblance to Mickey Mouse. "Because … oxygen is abundant," Steven Desch, study co-author and astrophysicist at Arizona State University, explains in a statement, "any source of hydrogen could have served the origin of Earth's water."

As Chelsea Gohd writes for Discover magazine, hydrogen gas held within the solar nebula was incorporated into planets' interiors during their training. Although much of this hydrogen remains trapped in our planet's core, the team's analysis suggests that a small portion of the pipeline managed to escape, ultimately contributing to the building of the watershed. Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

Until now, researchers cited the two most commonly accepted sources of water-asteroids and comets-based their assessments on ocean water and asteroids' chemical signatures, which contain similar ratios of deuterium, a heavy hydrogen isotope, and normal hydrogen. But as Nick Carne reports for Cosmos, samples collected from deep within the Earth's interior, near the boundary between the core and mantle, exhibit lower levels of deuterium, pointing to the gas' non-asteroidal origins.

"Earth must have started with some other sources of hydrogen deuterium-to-hydrogen than asteroids," Popular ScienceNeel V. Patel. "The only possible source is solar nebula gas."

According to Patel, the scientists' leading theory of early interoperability between water-logged asteroids, which one of the following hypotheses is a complete planetary embryo complete with an external layer of magma, and hydrogen-heavy solar nebula gas. When the solar nebula is in the air, it begins creating an atmosphere. Isotopic fractionation, normal hydrogen kept moving deep into the core, while the deuterium isotopes remained in the mantle. Continued to grow with smaller embryos and other celestial bodies eventually enabled

These asteroid impacts generated the majority of the planet 's water, Mindy Weisberger reports for Live Science, but a small portion-relatively speaking, as the quantity of water in the earth is divided into three parts.

Desch tells Popular Science that the team's findings could help scientists better explore the habitability of other worlds.

"Even planets that form as far as water-rich asteroids can still have water," he says. "Not as much as Earth, perhaps, but it is a floor of about 0.1 to 0.2 oceans' worth of hydrogen [applicable to Venus and many other exoplanets]. To the extent the model is verified, it strongly supports the idea of ​​rapid planetary growth. "

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