A team of scientists in France found that at least half of Earth’s water would have been generated before our planet.
The research was carried out by scientists from three French research centers, who detail in an article for Magazine Nature Astronomy who found the same isotopic composition in traces of water in a meteorite dating back 4.57 billion years.
Specifically, the experts carried out a series of tests on the Efremovka meteorite, discovered in Kazakhstan in 1962. Meteorites are fantastic objects of study to unravel the mysteries of the formation of the universe, because despite burning when they come into contact with the atmosphere, they usually its composition does not suffer notable alterations, so they maintain the “traces” on its history.
They added that the method of analysis of the meteorite was novel, since it was carried out exclusively to analyze the ancient rock, in which inclusions of calcium and aluminum were traced.
In their conclusions, the experts say that the minerals and their isotopic composition reveal that two large gas reservoirs existed in the first 200,000 years of our solar system’s existence, before the first planetary embryos were formed.
One of these deposits contained water, whose isotopic composition was extremely similar to that found on Earth, which, according to specialists, indicates that the water on our planet was formed before the protoplanetary disk that gave rise to Earth.
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