Earth and its aquatic beginnings, The secret of water in building blocks!

Hey, curious earthlings! Today we get into the time machine and go back to when our beloved Sun was still wrinkle-free and everything in the solar system was a kind of cosmic disk, a big party of dust and rocky gas. Imagine, 4.56 billion years ago! At that moment, little dust pebbles decided to team up, as if they were forming the best band in the universe. They came together and became giants, becoming the “planetesimals,” the basic building blocks for Earth and the other nearby planets.

Scientists, always with their curious minds, have been trying for quite some time to understand what those ancient planetesimal formation sites were like and here comes the million-dollar question: Was the Earth always as wet as it is now? A new study, which is basically a combination of meteorite data and laboratory science, says that the first planetesimals of the inner solar system formed with water as standard! A real twist on cosmic scripts! Imagine these meteorites as relics of ancient times, like galactic time capsules, telling us secrets about the beginnings of the solar system. They do not bring water directly, but scientists are like space detectives and can deduce their presence loss by analyzing how they affected other chemical elements.

Think of it as a cosmic kitchen game: water, composed of hydrogen and oxygen, playing at mixing with other elements such as iron. And voilà! We have iron oxide, the star of the show on Mars! One scientist, Damanveer Grewal, with his cosmic magnifying glass, examined iron meteorites to see how much iron had oxidized, sort of like assessing the original recipe for planetesimal formation. And surprise, they discovered that these space building blocks had the same amount of iron missing, whether they came from the inner or outer solar system. What does this mean? That the planetesimals formed in a place where water was the order of the day, defying classical models of the solar system! Earth and company could have been born already hydrated from the beginning.

Although, as in every good story, there is a twist, this method only detects the water that was used to oxidize the iron, not the water that would form our oceans. So, the plot thickens and leaves the door open for more discoveries. And that’s all, scouts! The cosmic story is more fascinating than we could have imagined. Who would have thought that these meteorites hide water secrets from the beginning of time? Until the next adventure in space!