Boffins find 'missing link' between interstellar ice and what comes out of the tap
It looks likely that the water on Earth is older than the Sun and the stuff we drink today probably isn't all that different than it was over 4.6 billion years ago when our star formed.
Researchers at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory , working with the instruments at Chile's Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array , reached that conclusion based on observations of protostar V883 Orionis, a part of the Orion constellation located around 1,305 light years from Earth. In apublished in Nature, the boffins say the still-forming star is the missing link to explain how interstellar ice becomes planet-bound water.
"We can think of the path of water through the Universe as a trail. We know what the endpoints look like, which are water on planets and in comets, but we wanted to trace that trail back to the origins of water,"Prior to this research, Tobin said, it was possible to link water on Earth to water in comets, and to observe frozen water in the clouds that form around protostars, but there no link between the two had been recorded.
"We now have an unbroken chain in the lineage of water from comets and protostars to the interstellar medium," Tobin said.that there's plenty of water to be found in the gasses and clouds of interstellar space, mostly frozen ice clinging to the surface of dust particles. As such particles form clouds, gravity comes into play and sometimes results in clouds collapsing into protostars like V883. The rest of the liquid from the cloud gets stuck in the young star's protoplanetary disk, and from there it ends up on planets or comets as the cloud continues to condense around the star's gravity.
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