November 5, 2018

• Why Earth’s water could be older than Earth itself

  

  Vince Cavataio/plainpicture

  How did water survive Earth's searingly hot birth? A radical new answer turns planetary history on its head – and could revolutionise the search for alien life.

  This planet is a lush world of rivers, lakes and streams. But it shouldn’t be, according to our traditional interpretation of Earth’s past. Our measurements at the Open University in Milton Keynes provide a strong indication that this explanation is past its sell-by date. The true story of how Earth got its water looks to be far stranger. If we are right, it means water, and potentially life that thrives in it, is probably far more widespread in the universe than we dared dream.

  To understand why the presence of so much water on Earth is so unlikely, we need to go back more than 4.6 billion years. The young sun is shining, and encircling it is a maelstrom of gas and dust that will clump into the planets. Any water exists as ice in interstellar space. If any of that ice found itself in the inner part of the solar system, where the rocky planets like Earth will form, the heat and radiation split it into its constituent atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. This means the material that formed Earth shouldn’t have contained a speck of moisture.

  Click here for the complete article by Natalie Starkey of NewScientist:

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