Jakarta – Earth is the third planet from the Sun within the Solar System and is the only planet that can be inhabited by various types of living things. Earth is known to have factors supporting the life of living things in it such as an atmosphere with free oxygen, gravity, oceans of liquid water on the surface, and others.
Reported from detikEdu, Earth also stores the oldest component in the Solar System, namely Water. Water on Earth is believed to have been brought up by comets that collided billions of years ago, but that water did not form with the solar system.
Quoting from a report on the IFL Science website, researchers believe that water is already a component of the pre-solar nebula.
The researchers then tried to understand the origin of water on Earth, they observed the emission of two types of water namely regular and heavy. In simple terms, water is made of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms.
Each element from water has an isotope that is a slightly closer 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 that can explain where water came from. Some comets have very similar ratios to Earth’s.
In their research, scientists discovered a link between water and the formation of star systems in a 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.
An astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, John J. Tobin explained, there was a missing link in this case, namely V883 Orionis. Tobin also said that the composition of the water in the disk is very similar to the composition of comets in the solar system.
This proves 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 extraordinary discovery of water in distant star systems like those on Earth is proof that the water we normally drink and use is much older than Earth itself.
“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.
A postgraduate researcher at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, Margot Leemker, 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 into gas. And ALMA succeeded in studying the composition of gases, finding a connection between cosmic water and the earth.
In fact, it can be said that this research is far from finished. Future infrared observatories such as the Extremely Large Telescope will be better suited to tracking the journey of water from interstellar clouds to comets and then to planets.
Watch Video “Broken Earth“
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