How water came to Earth? Scientists may have found answer
Scientists have long pondered over the origins of water and some have believed that the water may have been delivered to Earth by icy comets, but now, a new theory may have explained the origins of the crucial life-supporting compound.
Scientists have found out that water was absorbed from Earth’s space environment as it was “young and thirsty”.
This theory may allow scientists to revise their thinking about habitability and search for life outside our solar system, suggesting that exoplanets containing water may be more similar to our planet than anticipated.
According to this new theory published in the journal Nature, around 4.5 billion years ago when “our sun was in its initial stages after birth. It was surrounded by a disk of gas and dust — known as a proto-planetary disk.”
Tiny particles of dust would be quickly sucked up by forming planets once they reached a certain size, the theory underlined while adding that in the case of the infant Earth, this vacuuming up of disk material ensured our planet was supplied with water.
A member of the research team at the Centre for Star and Planet Formation, University of Copenhagen, Isaac Onyett, said: “The disk also contains many icy particles. As the vacuum cleaner effect draws in the dust, it also captures a portion of the ice.”
“This process contributes to the presence of water during Earth’s formation, rather than relying on a chance event delivering water 100 million years later.”
“People have debated how planets form for a long time,” University of Copenhagen geochemist and a member of the team behind the theory, Martin Schiller, said in a statement.
“One theory is that planets are formed by the gradual collision of bodies, progressively increasing their size over 100 million years. In this scenario, the presence of water on Earth would need a sort of chance event.”
“If that is how Earth was formed, then it is pretty lucky that we have water on Earth,” Schiller said.
“This makes the chances that there is water on planets outside our solar system very low.”
The theory was put forth by using silicon isotopes as an instrument to measure the mechanisms of planet formation and the timescales involved.
While examination of isotopes in over 60 meteorites and planetary bodies, the experts established a link between rocky planets like Earth and other bodies in the solar system.
“This theory would predict that whenever you form a planet like Earth, you will have water on it,” team member and Globe Institute professor Martin Bizzarro said.
“If you go to another planetary system where there is a planet orbiting a star the size of the sun, then the planet should have water if it is in the right distance.”