Water,
the key ingredient for life, is not only abundant on Earth, it is also
ubiquitous across the solar system. Either as ice or sometimes as
liquid, water has been spotted in comets, the icy moons of the giant
planets, and even in the shadowed basins of Mercury. Water has left its
mark in hydrated minerals in meteorites that penetrated our atmosphere,
in lunar basalts retrieved by the astronauts, and in Martian melt
inclusions recovered from rock samples ejected from Mars that found
their way to Earth. Comets and asteroids (as traced by meteorites)
remain the oldest, most primitive objects with water. They provide a
natural time capsule of the conditions present during the Sun’s epoch of
planet formation.
No one knows for sure when and where these ices formed. Water might
have been present in the dense interstellar medium from which Sun formed
or it might have been made somehow within the solar nebula after it
developed. Astronomers are trying to determine which applies because the
former suggests that all planet-forming systems will have abundant
water ices, whereas the latter presumably means that the abundance of
water can vary dramatically from stellar system to system.
Water is usually made with two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen,
as H2O, but it can also come in deuterated form in which a deuterium
atom replaces one hydrogen atom. The fraction of deuterated water in a
sample is a powerful measure of the age and origin of the sample:
Interstellar ices are highly enriched in the deuterated species because
the chemistry of interstellar space – ionizing radiation in particular -
preferentially destroys normal H2O water. Ice in interstellar space
can have a two to thirty times higher fraction of deuterated water than
is found on Earth.
CfA astronomer Karin Oberg and her colleagues did comprehensive
modeling of the proto-planetary disk that forms around new stars,
including the effects of ultraviolet ionization and the influence of
radioactive elements in the material. In the latest issue of Science,
the team reports a number of key results, including that the young solar
nebula must have contained some pristine interstellar ice. A
considerable fraction of the solar system’s water therefore predates the
Sun. If the solar system is typical, the scientists conclude, then
interstellar ices in a stellar birth cloud should be widely available to
all young protoplanetary systems.
Reference(s):
"The
Ancient Heritage of Water Ice in the Solar System," L. Ilsedore
Cleeves, Edwin A. Bergin, Conel M. O'D. Alexander, Fujun Du, Dawn
Graninger, Karin I. Öberg, Tim J. Harries, Science, 345, 1590, 2014.