Water could be much more widespread in our universe than we thought . A team of researchers from the Institut de Minéralogie, de Physique des Matériaux et de Cosmochimie, the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, the Nanosciences et Innovation pour les Matériaux and the Biomédecine et l’Energie Research Unit (CNRS / CEA), among others, have concluded that up to half of the water on our planet was formed before our own planet existed , that is, in the cloud of dust and gas that was the progenitor of our solar system.
And… if water can form in abundance in such clouds, then it can be found everywhere. This is fabulous news in the face of our search for extraterrestrial life in other planetary systems.
abundance of water
Our solar system is noted for being quite prolific in that liquid, life-supporting element we call water. Without it, life as we know it would not exist. On our planet, it exists in abundance and, for the moment, it is the only place where we have found life. But there is water on the Moon, on Mars, on Mercury, on the icy moons of the giant planets, on comets… but the big question is: where did all that water come from?
To answer this question, a team led by geochemist Jérôme Aléon from the National Museum of Natural History in France analyzed the isotopes of water in a meteorite from the birth of the Solar System and discovered that they match the isotopes of water found on Earth. Today.
“The initial isotopic composition of water in the Solar System is of paramount importance for understanding the origin of water in planetary bodies, but remains unknown, despite numerous studies,” the authors write in their study published in the journal Nature Astronomy . .
What does this mean?
Considering that certain meteorites may represent true time capsules of the birth of the solar system, since there are occasional rock samples that reach the Earth’s surface with little sign of overcooking, that is, they have not been removed or erased traces of their origins, represent an excellent opportunity to investigate the water content they once contained.
Specifically, the Efremovka meteorite, discovered in Kazakhstan in 1962, has components dating back 4.57 billion years. Scientists examined this meteorite and its ancient calcium and aluminum inclusions using unique technology created specifically for this purpose.
The minerals and ratios found in this meteorite indicated that two large gas reservoirs existed in the first 200,000 years of our Solar System’s existence before planetesimals (or seed planets) formed. One of these reservoirs had a lot of water. And it turns out that the isotopic composition of that water is extremely similar to that of Earth’s water , indicating that water was there all along, in the early solar system, even before Earth was a speck in the disk. protoplanetary.
Referencia: Aléon, J., Lévy, D., Aléon-Toppani, A. et al. Determination of the initial hydrogen isotopic composition of the solar system. Nature Astronomy (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-021-01595-7
