The water in your glass is the oldest you've ever seen in your life; most of its molecules are older than the sun itself. It appeared shortly after the first stars lit up, and since then the cosmic ocean has been fueled by their thermonuclear furnaces. As a gift from the ancient stars, the Earth got the World Ocean, and the neighboring planets and satellites - glaciers, underground lakes and global oceans of the solar system.
1. Big Bang
Hydrogen is almost as old as the Universe itself: its atoms appeared as soon as the temperature of the newborn Universe dropped so much that protons and electrons could exist. Since then, hydrogen has been the most abundant element in the Universe for 14.5 billion years, both in mass and in the number of atoms. Clouds of gas, mostly hydrogen, fill the entire space.
2. First stars
As a result of the gravitational collapse of clouds of hydrogen and helium, the first stars appeared, inside which thermonuclear fusion began and new elements were formed, including oxygen. Oxygen and hydrogen gave water; its first molecules could have formed immediately after the appearance of the first stars - 12.7 billion years ago. In the form of highly dispersed gas, it fills interstellar space, cooling it and thus bringing the birth of new stars closer.
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3. Around the stars
The water that was present in the gas cloud that gave birth to the star passes into the material of the protoplanetary disk and objects that form from it - planets and asteroids. At the end of their lives, the most massive stars explode into supernovae, leaving behind nebulae in which new stars explode.
Water in the solar system
Scientists believe there are two reservoirs for water on Earth. 1. On the surface: steam, liquid, ice. Oceans, seas, glaciers, rivers, lakes, atmospheric moisture, groundwater, water in living cells. Origin: water from comets and asteroids that bombarded the Earth 4.1-3.8 billion years ago. 2. Between the top and bottom mantles. Water in bound form in minerals. Origin: water from a protosolar cloud of interstellar gas, or, according to another version, water from a protosolar nebula created by a supernova explosion.
In 2011, American geologists discovered in a diamond thrown to the surface during the eruption of a Brazilian volcano, a ringwoodite mineral with a high water content. It was formed at a depth of more than 600 km underground, and the mineral water was present in the magma that gave birth to it. And in 2015, another group of geologists, relying on seismic data, came to the conclusion that there is a lot of water at this depth - as much as in the World Ocean on the surface, if not more.
However, if you look more broadly, comets and asteroids of the solar system borrowed their water from the protosolar cloud of cosmic gas, which means that the oceans of the Earth and the water scattered in the magma layer have one ancient source.
- Mars: polar ice caps, seasonal streams, a lake of salty liquid water about 20 km in diameter at a depth of about 1.5 km.
- Asteroid belt: Water is probably present on the C-class asteroids of the asteroid belt, as well as the Kuiper belt and small groups of asteroids (including the terrestrial group) in a bound form. The presence of hydroxyl groups in the minerals of the asteroid Bennu has been confirmed, which suggests that the minerals once came into contact with liquid water.
- Moons of Jupiter. Europe: an ocean of liquid water under a layer of ice, or viscous and mobile ice under a layer of solid ice.
- Ganymede: Possibly not one subglacial ocean, but several layers of ice and salt water.
- Callisto: the ocean under 10 kilometers of ice.
- Moons of Saturn. Mimas: features of rotation can be explained by the existence of an under-ice ocean or an irregular (elongated) core shape.
- Enceladus: ice thickness from 10 to 40 km. Geysers gush through cracks in the ice. Beneath the ice is a salty liquid ocean.
- Titan: A very salty ocean 50 km below the surface, or salty ice extending to the moon's rocky core.
- Moons of Neptune. Triton: water and nitrogen ice and nitrogen geysers on the surface. There are probably large volumes of liquid ammonia in water under the ice.
- Pluto: A liquid ocean beneath solid nitrogen, methane, and carbon oxides could explain the dwarf planet's orbital anomalies.
Anastasia Shartogasheva