{"id":3411,"date":"2021-12-16T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-12-16T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/?p=3411"},"modified":"2021-12-02T05:17:21","modified_gmt":"2021-12-02T05:17:21","slug":"some-of-earths-water-may-have-come-from-the-sun-scientists-find","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/some-of-earths-water-may-have-come-from-the-sun-scientists-find\/","title":{"rendered":"Some of Earth’s Water May Have Come From the Sun, Scientists Find"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Evoking images of the Sun shouldn\u2019t normally make you think of water. After all, it\u2019s a giant hot ball of plasma; it\u2019s so hot that there exists only a small window of distance from the Sun wherein water can exist as a liquid. It\u2019s called the habitable zone<\/em> of a star, and lucky for us, our planet\u2019s sitting in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, before any water could exist as liquid on any given planet, it must first get the water from somewhere. And that\u2019s where the unknown lies for Earth\u2019s history with water: we don\u2019t know for sure where all our water came from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What we know of our Solar System\u2019s very own habitable zone, shown here in green, has given scientists crucial information to infer what the habitable zones of other stars look like, even if we can\u2019t physically pay a visit to look around for liquid water. Such is the case with the famous TRAPPIST-1 system, which made headlines a couple of years ago. (NASA\/JPL-Caltech, 2017) <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Several candidate water sources have been put up for debate, including just having them lying around when our planet was forming, and another case where all the water was brought to us by meteorites crashing into an early Earth billions of years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, there appears to be a source for Earthly water that remains unaccounted for up until now, and it\u2019s from the unlikeliest of places in space: our own Sun. The novel study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy<\/em><\/a>, posits this radical new way of thinking where our oceans and rivers came from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The key, according to the authors, lies with the fact that solar wind<\/em>, which is a stream of charged particles frequently released from the upper atmosphere of the Sun, contains hydrogen (H) ions. These ions are then capable of hitting the surfaces of space objects with no atmosphere\u2014like meteorites and space dust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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