Jakarta –
Air on Earth are believed to have been carried by comets that collided billions of years ago. However, water was not formed with the solar system.
Citing the site IFL Science, the researchers believe that water was already a component of the pre-solar nebula. To understand the origin of water on Earth, the researchers looked at the emission of two types of water: regular and heavy. Water is simply made of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms.
In water, each element has an isotope, which is a slightly heavier chemical twin because it has an extra neutron in its nucleus. One of the isotopes of hydrogen is deuterium, and if water has deuterium atoms instead of hydrogen it is called hard water.
Water Came From the Formation of Star Systems?
The ratio between simple and heavy water is a chemical fingerprint which tells us where the water came from. It is known that some comets have a ratio very similar to that of Earth.
Researchers found a link between water and the formation of star systems in the new system 1,300 light years from Earth.
Stars themselves form from gas clouds, gas clouds develop disks from which planets and comets can emerge.
John J. Tobin, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory reveals that V883 Orionis is the missing link in this case.
Tobin revealed that the composition of the water in the disc is very similar to the composition of comets in this Solar System.
This confirms that water in planetary systems formed billions of years ago, even before the Sun, in interstellar space, and has been inherited by comets and Earth relatively unchanged.
The discovery of water in a distant star system like the one on Earth is an extraordinary discovery. It also tells us that the water we drink and use is much older than our own planet.
“This time, we can now trace the origin of water in our Solar System to before the formation of the Sun,” said Tobin.
Need Further Research
Observations can be made thanks to the extraordinary capabilities of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) because something special is needed to make these observations.
Margot Leemker, a postgraduate researcher at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, explains that most of the water in planet-forming disks is frozen like ice, so it is usually hidden from our view.
Fortunately, V883 Orionis is a strange system because it was unusually hot from a star explosion that caused ice to turn to gas. And ALMA succeeded in studying the composition of gases, finding a connection between cosmic water and the earth.
However, this research is still far from finished. Future infrared observatories such as the Extremely Large Telescope will be better suited to tracking travel air from interstellar clouds to comets and then to planets.
Watch Video “Astrobiologists Say Laughing Gas Can Be A Sign Of Life On Exoplanets“
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