Where does the water come from?

Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —

Origin air on Earth has been a mystery to science for a long time. Its vital function to sustain life should not have occurred by chance. Like element can this appear?

There are various hypotheses and theories explaining how the water got here with some supporting evidence.

A study published in GeoScience World Elements titled ‘We drink good water that is 4.5 billion years old‘ suggests that another young solar system had plenty of water.

In a solar system like ours, water travels as young stars grow and planets form. The evidence, there is a strong water content on Earth, and shows that our planet’s water is 4.5 billion years old.

The two authors of the study, Cecilia Ceccarelli, an Italian astronomer from the Institute of Planetary Sciences and Astrophysics in Grenoble, France, and Fujun Du, an astronomer from the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing, China, traced the origins of water.

1. Period of the solar system

The formation of the solar system began with a giant molecular cloud. Clouds are mostly composed of hydrogen, the main component of water.

Followed by helium, oxygen and carbon, in order of abundance. The cloud also contains small grains of silicate dust and coal dust. The research also traces the history of water on Earth, and this is where it began.

In a cold molecular cloud, when oxygen meets dust grains, both freeze and stick to the surface. But water before was not water containing hydrogen and oxygen.

The lightest hydrogen molecules in the cloud, bouncing off the frozen dust grains until they meet oxygen.

When this happens, they react and form water ice of two types, namely ordinary water and heavy water containing deuterium.

Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen called heavy hydrogen (HDO). It has a proton and a neutron in its nucleus. This separates it from the “ordinary” hydrogen called protium.

Protium has protons but no neutrons. Both of these isotopes of hydrogen are stable and have survived to this day, and both can combine with oxygen to form water.

When water ice forms a cloak over the dust grains, the researchers call this the cold phase, the first step in a process they describe in their paper.

Gravity begins to exert itself on the cloud as matter settles in the center. More mass falls into the center of the molecular cloud and starts forming proto-stars (young stars).

Some of the gravity is converted into heat, and just a few astronomical units (AU) from the cloud’s center, the gas and dust on the disk reaches 100 Kelvin (K), or the equivalent of -173 degrees Celsius. Chemically, extreme cold is enough to trigger sublimation and ice changes phase to water vapor.

Sublimation takes place in the hot corino (hot cover surrounding the center of the cloud). Although they also contain complex organic molecules, water is the most abundant molecule in these areas even though it is still in the form of vapor.

“Hot Corino contains about 10,000 times as much water as Earth’s oceans,” the researchers wrote.

This is the second phase of the process outlined by the authors and they call it the protostellar phase.

Planetary phases on next page…