Earth's water could have originated from interactions between the hydrogen-rich atmospheres and magma oceans of the planetary embryos that comprised Earth's formative years, according to new work from Carnegie Science's Anat Shahar and UCLA's Edward Young and Hilke Schlichting. Their findings, which could explain the origins of Earth's signature features, are published in Nature.
This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: An illustration showing how some Earth's signature features, such as its abundance of water and its overall oxidized state could potentially be attributable to interactions between the molecular hydrogen atmospheres and magma oceans on the planetary embryos that comprised Earth's formative years. Credit: Edward Young/UCLA and Katherine Cain/Carnegie Institution for Science. For decades, what researchers knew about planet formation was based primarily on our own solar system. Although there are some active debates about the formation of gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, it is widely agreed upon that Earth and the other rocky planets accreted from the disk of dust and gas that surrounded our sun in its youth. As increasingly larger objects crashed into each other, the baby planetesimals that eventually formed Earth grew both larger and hotter, melting into a vast magma ocean due to the heat of collisions and radioactive elements. Over time, as the planet cooled, the densest material sank inward, separating Earth into three distinct layers—the metallic core, and the rocky, silicate mantle and crust. However, the explosion of exoplanet research over the past decade informed a new approach to modeling the Earth's embryonic state. "Exoplanet discoveries have given us a much greater appreciation of how common it is for just-formed planets to…