Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Email address Sign up Thank you! Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Water is at the center of one of the enduring questions about how life first formed on Earthr. More specifically, where did the very first water molecules form, and how? In 2020, researchers at France's University of Lorraine announced evidence seen in a meteorite known as Sahara 97096 that supported an increasingly popular theory: Earth's original water ingredients hid inside meteorites that collided with the planet billions of years ago. But a team at the University of Oxford is now countering that claim, and says proto-Earth had all the hydrogen it needed to kickstart life. Their conclusions were published on April 16 in the journal Icarus, and come after analyzing a similar meteorite recovered from Antarctica. The key to their counterargument resides in a rare type of space rock called enstatite chondrite. The meteorite's composition is particularly significant to planetary scientists because it's comparable to the planet as it was 4.55 billion years ago. While Sahara 97096 is an enstatite chondite, very few other specimens are known to exist on Earth. A specimen called LAR 12252 offers another example—and the University of Oxford's team recently took the space rock for a field trip to the Diamond Light Source synchrotron in Harwell, Oxfordshire. The meteorite used in this study—LAR12252—when it was discovered in Antarctica in 2012. Credit: ANSMET (ANtarctic Search for METeorites) Program, Case Western Reserve University and the University of…