Scientists discover water's existence in building blocks of solar system

Billions of years ago when the Sun that lights up our Earth was a young star, the solar system as we know it today was just a large disk of rocky dust and gas. For millions of years, tiny dust particles coalesced together to become a few mile-sized 'planetesimals', the basic units that formed our Earth and the rest of the planets and their moons in our solar system.

Researchers have now found if these planetesimals contained water.

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According to research conducted in the laboratory of Paul Asimow, Eleanor, and John R. McMillan, Professor of Geology and Geochemistry -- that appeared in the journal Nature Astronomy -- the ingredients for life, including water, may have been present in the seeds of rocky planets right from the start.

How was the study conducted?

The study combines meteorite data with thermodynamic modelling. It then determines whether the earliest solar system planetesimals were formed in the presence of water.

Researchers used samples of the solar system's earliest years in the form of iron meteorites.

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These meteorites are the remnants of the metallic cores of the earliest planetesimals in our solar system that did not constitute the formation of any planet but ultimately fell on our planet.

What did the researchers find?

While the trace of water is long gone in the meteorites, it's the proportion of missing iron in the iron meteorites that shows if water existed in planetesimals.

The researchers found that those iron meteorites thought to be derived from the inner solar system had about the same amount of missing iron metal as meteorites derived from the outer solar system.

Therefore, the planetesimals from both groups of meteorites must have formed in a part of the solar system where water was present.

What does it mean?

If planetesimals were formed at Earth's current orbital position, water would have existed only if the inner solar system was much cooler than what we know of them.

"If water was present in the early building blocks of our planet, other important elements like carbon and nitrogen were likely present as well," Damanveer Grewal, a former Caltech postdoctoral scholar and first author of the study said in a statement.

"The ingredients for life may have been present in the seeds of rocky planets right from the start."

The paper is titled "Accretion of the earliest inner solar system planetesimals beyond the water-snowline."

(With inputs from agencies)