Top Stories - Posted by Nicole Casal Moore-Michigan on Monday, October 10, 2011 9:56 - 2 Comments 
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...First comet found with ‘ocean water’
Comet Hartley, as imaged by NASA's EPOXI spacecraft. (Credit: NASA)
U. MICHIGAN (US) — For the first time, researchers have detected ocean-like water in a comet—new evidence supporting the theory comets delivered a significant portion of Earth’s oceans.
Share this article
Email
Republish this article
The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
“Life would not exist on Earth without liquid water, and so the questions of how and when the oceans got here is a fundamental one,” says Ted Bergin, an astronomy professor at the University of Michigan. “It’s a big puzzle and these new findings are an important piece.”
The findings are reported in the journal Nature.
Bergin is a co-investigator on HiFi, the Heterodyne Instrument for the Infrared on the Hershel Space Observatory. With measurements from HiFi, the researchers found that the ice on a comet called Hartley 2 has the same chemical composition as our oceans. Both have similar D/H ratios. The D/H ratio is the proportion of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, in the water. A deuterium atom is a hydrogen with an extra neutron in its nucleus.
“We were all surprised,” Bergin says.
Six other comets HiFi measured in recent years had a much different D/H ratio than our oceans, meaning similar comets could not have been responsible for more than 10 percent of Earth’s water.
The astronomers hypothesize that Hartley 2 was born in a different part of the solar system than the other six. Hartley most likely formed in the Kuiper belt, which starts near Pluto at about 30 times farther from the Sun than the Earth is. The other six hail from the Oort Cloud more than 5,000 times farther out.
The source of earth’s oceans has been a subject for debate among astronomers for decades. Until now, asteroids were thought to have provided most of the water. Now, however, Herschel has shown that at least one comet does have ocean-like water.
“The results show that the amount of material out there that could have contributed to Earth’s oceans is perhaps larger than we thought,” Bergin says.
Herschel, a European Space Agency mission with NASA participation, is an orbiting telescope that allows astronomers to observe at the far-infrared wavelengths where organic molecules and water emit their chemical signatures.
More news from the University of Michigan: http://ns.umich.edu/
Please wait
2 Comments
Hemmingplay
Good question — and I have actually given a lecture on this subject called Origin of Earth’s Water which is available on iTunes (for free) under the iTunesU (Saturday Morning Physics).
We think it likely formed in space before the planets were born.
Nitpicky of me, but saying that certain comets could be the source of much of the water in our oceans begs the question: how did ice form in the outer reaches of the solar system in the first place?
It might have taken an extra sentence or two to summarize the answer and so not derail the purpose of this article, but it would have served the reader to information that would help understand this finding, too.