Quoted from Science Alert, Thursday (17/2/2022), years of research to find out where and how the earth gets its water may be the key to finding life on other worlds. But in fact, it turns out that scientists do not know for sure where the water on earth comes from.
One potential theory for the existence of water is that it came from the collision of an asteroid and comet when Earth was just forming. But a new analysis of rocks collected from the moon brought to Earth by Apollo debunks that theory.
READ: Uranus was once hit by an object twice the size of Earth
According to a team of researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the most likely explanation is that the Earth formed with the presence of water.
” Earth created together with its water or the earth is hit by something that is essentially pure H2O, “explains cosmochemist Greg Brennecka of LLNL.
Brennecka said this explanation would break the theory that the source of water on Earth comes from a meteorite or asteroid impact.
Researchers understand that the moon is a great place to study Earth’s history. The moon was formed when two large objects collided and reshaped into a clump that would become the earth and the moon.
According to the hypothesis, the impact of the giant collision 4.5 billion years ago completely depleted the earth and moon from its volatility. “This neatly explains the origin of volatiles in the Earth-moon system,” the researchers said.
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