If the Earth had stayed as it was after formation, we humans would not be here. The beautiful thing about Earth compared to all the other planets is the most simplest of things: water. Our two closest neighbors, Mars and Venus, are both in what is called the “habitual zone” for life but neither planet has water. So where did water on Earth come from?
When the solar system was made there were trillions of comets that were flying past the planets. Comets are made primarily of water ice, rock, and solidified gases. It could have only taken a few of these comets to impact Earth to deliver all the water we needed. But many scientists believed this couldn’t be the case because these comets were made up of a heavier form of water. The Hydrogen in this water had one proton and one neutron. In water currently found on Earth water has no neutron.
So what does this mean? It means scientists ultimately were looking at the “wrong”
comets. They had originally been looking at comets found in the Kuiper belt which lies between Mars and Jupiter. The real place scientists should have been looking was the Oort cloud, which is which is 10,000 times more distant than the Kuiper belt.
The existence of water on Earth has always been a hot topic for scientists. It’s not like a geyser just popped up near your garage door and started spurting out enough water to create oceans. There was a belief that chemical reactions between sunlight and other gases during Earth’s creation period was what slowly created this water vapor. When the planet cooled it was believed that the Earth rained for years – which created these Oceans as it was raining on a rocky, flat surface.
These new findings shed a new hopeful light on this mystery. With just a little more evidence we should be able to prove for sure when and how exactly these comets bombarded the planet. The other question we should ask is did Venus or Mars experience the same problem? It’s like Mars at least did as rovers have detected where water most certainly once flowed on its surface.
Mars is a planet that may be too small to sustain an atmosphere. It’s small planetary size plus the distance it is from the sun made it impossible for an atmosphere to exist. With this discovery of how water got to Earth it re-invigorates the talk of extraterrestrial life. Comets bombarding a planet like cars hitting a garage door are a very rare occurrence. If water was able to last on any of these planets life certainly has a chance to begin through the most basic of organisms and cells.
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