How common is water in the universe?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The water in your glass is the oldest you've ever seen in your life; most of its molecules are older than the sun itself. It appeared shortly after the first stars lit up, and since then the cosmic ocean has been fueled by their thermonuclear furnaces. As a gift from the ancient stars, the Earth got the World Ocean, and the neighboring planets and satellites - glaciers, underground lakes and global oceans of the solar system.

1. Big Bang

Hydrogen is almost as old as the Universe itself: its atoms appeared as soon as the temperature of the newborn Universe dropped so much that protons and electrons could exist. Since then, hydrogen has been the most widespread element of the Universe for 14.5 billion years, both in mass and in the number of atoms. Clouds of gas, mostly hydrogen, fill the entire space.

In 2011, astronomers discovered a young, sun-like star in the constellation Perseus, spewing out whole fountains of water.

Accelerating in the star's powerful magnetic field, the H20 molecules at a speed 80 times the speed of a machine-gun bullet escaped from the star's interior and, cooling down, turned into water droplets. Probably, such ejections of young stars are one of the sources of matter, including water, in interstellar space.

2. First stars

As a result of the gravitational collapse of clouds of hydrogen and helium, the first stars appeared, inside which thermonuclear fusion began and new elements were formed, including oxygen.

Oxygen and hydrogen gave water; its first molecules could have formed immediately after the appearance of the first stars - 12, 7 billion years ago. In the form of highly dispersed gas, it fills interstellar space, cooling it down and thus bringing new stars closer.

In 2011, astronomers found the largest space reservoir of water. It was discovered in the vicinity of a huge and ancient black hole 12 billion light-years from Earth; there would be enough water to fill the earth's oceans 140 trillion times!

But astronomers were more interested not in the amount of water, but in its age: after all, the distance to the cloud indicates that it existed when the age of the universe was one tenth of the present. This means that even then the water filled part of the interstellar space.

3. Around the stars

The water that was present in the gas cloud that gave birth to the star passes into the material of the protoplanetary disk and objects that form from it - planets and asteroids. At the end of their lives, the most massive stars explode into supernovae, leaving behind nebulae in which new stars explode.

Water in the solar system

Scientists believe there are two reservoirs for water on Earth. 1. On the surface: steam, liquid, ice. Oceans, seas, glaciers, rivers, lakes, atmospheric moisture, groundwater, water in living cells.

Origin: water of comets and asteroids that bombarded the Earth 4, 1-3, 8 billion years ago. 2. Between the top and bottom robes. Water in a bound form in the composition of minerals. Origin: water from a protosolar cloud of interstellar gas, or, according to another version, water from a protosolar nebula created by a supernova explosion.

In 2011, American geologists discovered in a diamond thrown to the surface during the eruption of a Brazilian volcano, a ringwoodite mineral with a high water content.

It was formed at a depth of more than 600 km underground, and the mineral water was present in the magma that gave rise to it. And in 2015, another group of geologists, relying on seismic data, came to the conclusion that there is a lot of water at this depth - as much as in the World Ocean on the surface, if not more.

However, if you look more broadly, the comets and asteroids of the solar system borrowed their water from the protosolar cloud of cosmic gas, which means that the oceans of the Earth and the water scattered in the magma have one ancient source.

• Mars:polar ice caps, seasonal streams, a lake of salty liquid water with a diameter of about 20 km at a depth of about 1.5 km.
• Asteroid Belt: water is likely to be present on the C-class asteroids of the asteroid belt, as well as the Kuiper belt and small groups of asteroids (including the terrestrial group) in a bound form. The presence of hydroxyl groups in the minerals of the asteroid Bennu has been confirmed, which suggests that the minerals once came into contact with liquid water.
• Moons of Jupiter. Europe: an ocean of liquid water under a layer of ice or viscous and mobile ice under a layer of solid ice.
• Ganymede: perhaps not one subglacial ocean, but several layers of ice and salt water.
• Callisto: ocean under 10 kilometers of ice.
• Moons of Saturn. Mimas: the peculiarities of rotation can be explained by the existence of the subglacial ocean or the irregular (elongated) shape of the core.
• Enceladus: ice thickness from 10 to 40 km. Geysers gush through cracks in the ice. Beneath the ice is a salty liquid ocean.
• Titanium: very salty ocean 50 km below the surface; or salty ice extending to the rocky core of the satellite.
• Moons of Neptune. Triton: water and nitrogen ice and nitrogen geysers on the surface. There are probably large volumes of liquid ammonia in water under the ice.
• Pluto: A liquid ocean beneath solid nitrogen, methane, and carbon oxides could explain the dwarf planet's orbital anomalies.