Everyone knows the importance of water on planet earth; no one can survive without water. So water was a vital source to increasing life on Earth and also imperative to evaluate the possibility of life on other planets. However, identifying the original source of Earth’s water is important to understanding how life-fostering environments come into being and how unlikely they’re to be found elsewhere.
New work from a team, including Carnegie’s Conel Alexander, observed that plenty of our solar system’s water perhaps originated as ices that formed in interstellar space. However; water is found throughout our solar system, not just on Earth, but on icy comets and moons and in the shadowed basins of Mercury. Thus water has been found included in mineral samples from meteorites, the Moon, and Mars.
Comets and asteroids specifically, being basic objects, deliver a natural “time capsule” of the conditions during the early days of our solar system. Their ices can tell experts about the ice that encircled the Sun after its birth, the origin of which was an unanswered question until now. In its youth, the Sun was surrounded by a proto-planetary disk, the so-called solar nebula, from which the planets were born.
But it was unclear to scientists whether the ice in this disk was created from the Sun’s own parental interstellar molecular cloud, from which it was created, or whether this interstellar water had been damaged and was recreated by the chemical reactions taking place in the solar nebula.
