Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The water found on planet Earth predates the formation of the sun – a discovery that could have implications in the ongoing search for life on other planets, according to research appearing in Friday’s the journal Science.
Scientists have long wondered whether the water found on our planet, in lunar craters and elsewhere originally came from ice ionized when the solar system was formed, or if it actually predated the solar system and was produced in the cold interstellar cloud of gas in which the sun was formed, explained Reuters reporter Irene Klotz.
Lead researcher Lauren Cleeves, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, and her colleagues had been analyzing how cosmic rays and other high-energy phenomenon impacted planet-forming disks of matter circling around young stars, Klotz said. While conducting their research, they realized that those conditions weren’t right for synthesizing new H2O molecules, meaning that it could have only formed as ice in interstellar gases.
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Based on their work, the study authors concluded that the water found on the Earth predated the sun. By demonstrating that water is “inherited” from the environment when a star is born, they believe that their findings suggest that other exoplanetary systems would have also had access to abundant water during their formation.
In their research, Cleeves and her fellow investigators focused on hydrogen and its heavier isotope deuterium, the Carnegie Institution of Science (one of the organizations that had experts participating in the study) said in a statement. Since isotopes of an element have a different mass than the original, they also behave somewhat differently during chemical reactions.
For this reason, scientists can discern the conditions under which water molecules formed by comparing their ratio of hydrogen to deuterium. Interstellar water-ice has a high ratio of deuterium to hydrogen because of the very low temperatures at which it forms, the researchers explained, though until now it was unknown how much of the deuterium enrichment was removed by chemical processing during the Sun’s birth, or how much deuterium-rich water-ice the newborn Solar System was capable of producing on its own.
The team developed models that simulated a protoplanetary disk in which all of the deuterium from space ice had already been eliminated through chemical processing, requiring the system to start over by producing ice that contains deuterium over a period of one million years. Their goal was to see if the system could reach the deuterium to hydrogen ratios found in the Earth’s ocean waters, meteorite samples, and so-called “time capsule” comets.
According to the Carnegie Institution, it was unable to do so, which told the study authors that at least a portion of the water in our solar system had to have originated in interstellar space – and, consequently, predated the birth of our sun. The findings, explained Carnegie’s Conel Alexander, “show that a significant fraction of our Solar System’s water, the most-fundamental ingredient to fostering life, is older than the Sun, which indicates that abundant, organic-rich interstellar ices should probably be found in all young planetary systems.”
“The implication of these findings is that some of the solar system’s water must have been inherited from the Sun’s birth environment, and thus predate the Sun itself,” Cleeves added in a statement. “If our solar system’s formation was typical, this implies that water is a common ingredient during the formation of all planetary systems. To date, the Kepler satellite has detected nearly 1,000 confirmed extrasolar planets. The widespread availability of water during the planet-formation process puts a promising outlook on the prevalence of life throughout the galaxy.”
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New Study Concludes That A Significant Amount Of Earth’s Water Is Older Than The Sun
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