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4 billion years ago
- Water covers more than 70 percent of Earth’s surface, but where all that life-giving liquid came from and when it arrived have long been a mystery. Now there's new research suggesting that our planet got its water more than 4 billion years ago, when a celestial object about the size of Mars collided with Earth to form the moon.
www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/how-did-earth-get-its-water-scientists-think-they-ve-ncna1011441How did Earth get its water? Scientists think they've solved ...
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It was long thought that Earth's water did not originate from the planet's region of the protoplanetary disk. Instead, it was hypothesized water and other volatiles must have been delivered to Earth from the outer Solar System later in its history.
Oct 6, 2019 · About 70 percent of our planet’s surface is covered with water, and it plays an important role in our daily lives. But how did water get on Earth in the first place?
- Comets vs. Asteroids
- Jupiter’s Pull
- A More ‘Tack’-Ful Approach
For decades, researchers have debated whether comets or asteroids delivered Earth’s water. At first glance, comets seemed a likely source. Originating beyond the orbit of Neptune, comets are the deep-freeze storage units of the solar system. They hold a lot of ice that has been locked away within their interiors since the formation of the solar sys...
Both of these comets are part of a community known as Jupiter family comets. They originated in the Kuiper belt, the ring of icy debris beyond Neptune where Pluto lives. The gravity of first Neptune and then Jupiter gradually nudged these comets into relatively short orbits that bring them closer to the sun. All previous D/H measurements were of co...
In 2011, a team of researchers including Raymond were tackling a different problem: Why is Mars so small? There should have been plenty of raw material available 4.6 billion years ago to turn Mars into a planet closer in size to Venus or Earth. But Mars is just about half Earth’s diameter and about one-tenth its mass. One possible explanation is th...
Dec 19, 2023 · If Earth started out with water trapped beneath its surface, volcanic activity could have released it as water vapor, which would have condensed and fell back to Earth as rain. About 4.51 billion years ago, a Mars-sized world named Theia is believed to have plowed into Earth.
Feb 23, 2024 · Astronomers have long wondered how Earth became water-rich—bountiful with abyssal oceans, frigid glaciers and rain that pours from the sky into lakes, rivers and wetlands.
Oct 25, 2024 · The team of researchers developed a new model for the origin of water on Earth that incorporates factors like water absorption on primordial dust grains, contributions from asteroid and planetary embryos, and water from comets.
To be fair, the origin of our planet’s water is an intricate story stretching back some 13.8 billion years to the Big Bang. And a key part of the story, centering on two particular solar...
