We don't know how life emerged on Earth, but one thing is certain: life as we know it on our planet wouldn't exist without the water that wraps around the surface, runs in rivulets, and falls from the sky.
Our planet is the only one known to have life, and the only one on which liquid water can be found in abundance . There are giant question marks over where and how it came from, but new research suggests that it was here in the Solar System before Earth even formed.
According to a team led by geochemist Jérôme Aléon of the French National Museum of Natural History, isotopes of water in a meteorite from the birth of the Solar System match isotopes of water found on Earth today. "The initial isotopic composition of water in the Solar System is of paramount importance to understanding the origin of water on planetary bodies but remains unknown, despite numerous studies,""Here we use the isotopic composition of hydrogen in calcium-aluminium-rich inclusions from primitive meteorites, the oldest Solar System rocks, to establish the hydrogen isotopic composition of water at the onset of Solar System formation.
Certain types of meteorites can act as time capsules from the birth of the Solar System. A star is born from a cloud of gas and dust that collapses under its own gravity, known as the collapse of the protostellar envelope.Meanwhile, material in the cloud around it flattens into a disk that feeds into the growing, spinning star. Once it has finished growing, what's left of that cloud forms everything else in that star's system – planets, asteroids, comets, and so forth.
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