About Half of the Water You Drink is Older than the Sun
New research reveals that as much as one half of all of Earth’s current water supply is older than the Sun.
An international team of scientists led by Ilse Cleeves at the University of Michigan looked back into creation of Earth and our solar system to find out where all of the water came from.
Some scientists think Earth’s supply of life-sustaining H2O was the result of chemical reactions that took place as the Sun and solar system began forming some 4.6 billion years ago.
Others theorize that today’s water originated about a million years earlier in the cold recesses of interstellar space from a molecular cloud that later provided material to form the sun and planets.
To reach their findings, Cleeves and her colleagues simulated the chemistry of our solar system as it was forming and then compared the ratio of two slightly different types of water, one that was plain H2O and the other, ‘heavier type’, that had been enriched with deuterium – an isotope of the hydrogen molecule.
The researchers found that the water in Earth’s oceans as ice found in comets have a higher ratio of the ‘heavy water’ to the deuterium free water than the Sun contains.
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