The Mystery of Water, Really Where Does It Come From?

Water, that which we know as the vital liquid, is one of the most abundant elements in the universe, in which it can be found in the form of ice and steam. In the earth it is abundantly liquid with 71% coverage of the surface and nevertheless it is still scarce. This liquid also has properties such as capillarity (property that allows water to rise through the roots and stems of plants to the leaves) and anomalous dilation (when the volume of water increases depending on its state, for example: ice has a greater volume than the mass of liquid water) that make it the perfect aid for the development of life. In spite of all that is known so far of water, that its natural process consists of evaporation, condensation, precipitation and that the hydrogen was born after the Bing Bang and oxygen results from dead stars, it is curious that none of this explains yet the origin of water.

The most named theory so far is that of comets. It says that 4,600 million years ago when the earth formed, it turned out to be too hot to contain water, however, after the violent acts that took place in the solar system at that time; It started what we know as plate tectonics and volcanism, forming gases that somehow created along with some comet impacts, small seas on the surface.

Despite this, it was not until 3,900 million years ago, when the orbits of the planets Uranus and Neptune had a drastic change, which caused what is known as "late bombardment" (stage of gravitational imbalance that drastically affected comets and asteroids, which caused their redistribution throughout the Solar System), which provoked violent clashes with the other planets, creating the oceans that we can see on Earth today. On the other hand, studies have shown that this may not be entirely true; Thanks to technological advances, measurements have been made with a technique that determines the ratio of deuterium (stable isotope of hydrogen, which is the same as this one, but heavier) and hydrogen, no matches were found, noting that this ratio is double or even more in comets than in the oceans of the earth. This hypothesis has caused scholars to rethink the question: So where does water come from?

About 60 years ago scientists discovered water in star hatcheries, in places where space gas is concentrated, thus allowing the birth of these extraordinary celestial bodies. Thanks to the Herschel Space Observatory, these scholars could somehow trace the water and detect for the first time the presence of water in a pre-stellar nucleus (cold accumulation of matter, which is thought to become a star and then a system planetary). The impressive thing is that the observatory managed to find water in all the stages of the life of the stars. The nucleus where water was observed is located about 430 light-years from the earth and it is precisely there where the Herschel satellite detected so much water as to fill the earth's oceans 2,000 times.

Because of the findings made by Herschel, astronomers began studies about the journey that water can make through the universe, visualizing it in clouds where stars are formed, explaining that these are created in cold and dense nuclei called pre-stellar condensations, in this place the water is in the form of ice on the surface of the dust grains. If the grain is heated to a temperature higher than 100 degrees Kelvin, the frozen water can be transformed into steam; on the other hand, if said grains are at a lower temperature, then other mechanisms will be given that can return part of the water molecules to the gas phase while maintaining a certain amount of water vapor in the cloud.

On the other hand, water could be observed in the circumstellar disk or proto-planetary that is formed when the star reaches adulthood, in this disk the future planets will be formed. In this part water has been detected, so these are the main object of study, since this can help to understand the origin of water in the land. There is another theory where it is indicated that the water can come from certain stellar bodies that come from another location, specifically from the Kuiper belt located beyond Neptune, these turn out to be very different from the comets studied previously. When conducting studies they discovered that the ratio of deuterium and hydrogen with these bodies is very similar to that of ocean water, so the water could come in part from cometary collisions formed in the Kuiper belt with the Earth.

There are many theories that have been presented to explain the existence of water on our planet and the universe in general, however, as technology advances and satellites become more evolved, there is a good chance of finding the correct explanation of the origin of water. Now it is known that, water is basically in solid state in molecular clouds of the galaxy. In the last stages of the life of the stars, water is also formed in large quantities from the coatings of red giants; at some point in their lives they expel gas from their coatings into the interstellar medium, where the water molecules are destroyed by ultraviolet radiation, thus releasing the oxygen and hydrogen atoms, which will then be used to form compounds such as water. The study of water in the universe, including our solar system, is necessary to discover the origin of life and open the way to find it beyond our borders.