Tuesday, March 21, 2023

3927 - WATER ON EARTH - how did it get here?

 

-   3927 -  WATER  ON  EARTH  -  how did it get here?   A reserve of water the size of 140 trillion oceans is lurking in a faraway supermassive black hole, the universe's largest deposit of water and 4,000 times the amount found in the Milky Way.


------------  3927  -  WATER  ON  EARTH  -  how did it get here?

-    Water makes up 71% of Earth's surface, but no one knows how or when such massive quantities of water arrived on Earth.

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-    Researchers are analyzing melted meteorites that had been floating around in space since the solar system's formation 4.5 billion years ago. They found that these meteorites had extremely low water content  They were among the driest extraterrestrial materials ever measured.

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-   These results, which let researchers rule them out as the primary source of Earth's water, could have important implications for the search for water,and life, on other planets. It helps researchers understand the unlikely conditions that aligned to make Earth a habitable planet.  Getting water and having surface oceans on a planet that is small and relatively near the sun is a challenge."

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            -    The team of researchers analyzed seven melted, or achondrite, meteorites that crashed into Earth billions of years after splintering from at least five planetesimals.   Planetesimals are objects that collided to form the planets in our solar system.

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            -   In a process known as melting, many of these planetesimals were heated up by the decay of radioactive elements in the early solar system's history, causing them to separate into layers with a crust, mantle and core.

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-   Because these meteorites fell to Earth only recently, this experiment was the first time anyone had ever measured their volatiles.  They used an electron microprobe to measure their levels of magnesium, iron, calcium and silicon and water contents measured with a secondary ion mass spectrometry instrument.

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-     To reduce contamination, researchers first baked their samples in a low-temperature vacuum oven to remove any surface water. Before the samples could be analyzed in the secondary ion mass spectrometer, the samples had to be dried out once again.  They had to leave the samples under a turbo pump—a really high-quality vacuum—for more than a month to draw down the terrestrial water enough.

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-    Some of their meteorite samples came from the inner solar system, where Earth is located and where conditions are generally assumed to have been warm and dry.

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-    Other rarer samples came from the colder, icier outer reaches of our planetary system. While it was generally thought that water came to Earth from the outer solar system, it has yet to be determined what types of objects could have carried that water across the solar system.

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-     After analyzing the achondrite meteorite samples, researchers discovered that water comprised less than two millionths of their mass. For comparison, the wettest meteorites, carbonaceous chondrites, contain up to about 20% of water by weight, or 100,000 times more than the meteorite samples.

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-    This means that the heating and melting of planetesimals leads to near-total water loss, regardless of where these planetesimals originated in the solar system and how much water they started out with. Not all outer solar system objects are rich in water. This led them to conclude that water was likely delivered to Earth via unmelted, or chondritic, meteorites.

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-    Water is considered to be an ingredient for life to be able to flourish, so as we're looking out into the universe and finding all of these exoplanets, we're starting to work out which of those planetary systems could be potential hosts for life.  In order to be able to understand these other solar systems, we want to understand our own.

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-  A reserve of water the size of 140 trillion oceans is lurking in a faraway supermassive black hole, the universe's largest deposit of water and 4,000 times the amount found in the Milky Way.

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-    This amount of water was discovered by  astronomers 12 billion light-years away, where it appears as vapor dispersed across hundreds of light-years.

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-  The reservoir was discovered in a quasar's gaseous area, which is a brilliant compact region in the heart of a galaxy powered by a black hole. This demonstrates that water may be present throughout the cosmos, even at the start.

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-    Water has never been discovered this far out before. The light from the quasar (specifically, the APM 08279+5255 quasar in the constellation Lynx) took 12 billion years to reach Earth, implying that this mass of water existed when the universe was just 1.6 billion years old.

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-    One group used the Z-Spec instrument at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory in Hawaii, while the other used the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps.   These sensors detect millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, allowing the detection of trace gases (or vast reservoirs of water vapor) in the early cosmos.

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-    The discovery of many spectral fingerprints of water in the quasar provided researchers with the data they needed to calculate the vast magnitude of the reservoir.

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                   March 21, 2023     WATER  ON  EARTH  -  how did it get here?             3927                                                                                                                         

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--------------------- ---  Tuesday, March 21, 2023  ---------------------------

 

 

 

 

         

 

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