The water that we still have on Earth today dates back to tens of billions of years ago, even before the birth of the Sun. This is indicated by the observations of a star in formation 1,305 light-years away from us, a sort of photograph that allowed us to reveal the distant past of our Solar System. That distant event was captured by the Alma radio telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which is located in the Chilean Andes, in the Atacama Desert. The data were analyzed by the group of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the United States coordinated by John Tobin and the result is published in the journal Nature.
The researchers were able for the first time to analyze in detail the different presence of water molecules around a still forming star, called V883 Orionis. In particular they recognized the chemical signature of water composed of 2 atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen and to distinguish it from water in which a hydrogen atom is replaced by one of its variants, deuterium.
These two types of water can only form in very particular conditions and recognizing their respective percentages provides a sort of signature for knowing their age and origin. Something very similar would also have happened around our Sun: “this means that water in our Solar System formed long before the Sun, planets and comets formed,” said Merel van ‘t’Hoff, University of Michigan astronomer and co-author of the paper.
Source: Ansa
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