The origins of water on Earth shed light thanks to the discovery of a surprising star
Astronomers have traced the origins of water on Earth to a time before the Sun, thanks to the observation of a very particular star, called V883 Orionis.
A star 1,300 light-years from Earth may have just revealed one of the solar system's best-kept secrets : the appearance of water on our planet . Scientists have always come up against a "missing link" that prevented any certainty. But this star, called V883 Orionis , has made it possible to determine that water was formed before the Sun , 4.5 billion years old! We explain to you.
This star is surrounded by an enormous disc of matter. It was in this disk that scientists detected water vapor, swirling with all the other dust and gas destined to one day merge to create other orbiting planets . This suggests that the water in the solar system – including that currently on Earth – was present in the gaseous cradle that gave birth to the Sun. Water was there, not just before Earth, but before the Sun , and helped our solar system grow, according to research published in the journal Nature , reported by the European Southern Observatory (ESO)."Water is a fundamental molecule in the process of formation of stars and planets" , can we read in Nature.
"This confirms the idea that water in planetary systems formed billions of years ago, before the Sun, in interstellar space, and that comets and the Earth inherited it, relatively unchanged ."
An astronomical amount of water
Several large telescopes, including that of the ESO in the Atacama, in Chile, have been used for this study which is shaking the world of astronomy . The ' hot nature' of V883 Orionis' disk, through accelerated growth, allowed observations that had not been possible on other embryonic planets, where the water is frozen and difficult to distinguish, explains the team of John J. Tobin, astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the United States and lead author of the study. What they saw was not the H2O molecule, but "a slightly heavier version" , where instead of having one atom of oxygen and two atoms of hydrogen, an H atom is replaced by deuterium. And it turns out that structure V883 Orionis contains at least 1,200 times the amount of water found in Earth's oceans
Scientists already knew how to trace the arrival of water present on Earth to comets and asteroids , because their composition is the same. But why comets contained water had not yet been fully explained. "We can think of the path of water through the universe as a treasure hunt . We know what the extremities (water on planets) look like but we wanted to follow this trail to the origins of water “, explains astronomer John J. Tobin. This star was therefore the missing link.
The results suggest that all the water in a planetary system comes almost directly from the clouds from which its star was born .
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