Scientists have formulated their first major insights since the ESA’s Rosetta mission – and their discovery could make a huge splash.
Last month the ESA made international news landing a spacecraft on the surface of a comet. Though the world’s first comet landing was a spectacular achievement, the agency’s Rosetta orbiter continues to circle comet 67P/G-C investigating the nature of the space rock.
In fact, in fewer than four months Rosetta has generated enough spectrograph data to help scientists discover that comets may not have been a major source of water on Earth.
According to a paper published this week in Science, researchers have examined the hydrogen and deuterium ratios that exist in 67P’s ices and have concluded that its water content is unlike our own planet’s water. Apparently the ices present on 67P/G-C have around three times more heavy water than Earth.
While comets, which originate in the outer part of the solar system, might not have played a large role in the formation of Earth’s oceans, scientists still believe larger asteroids may have ferried massive amounts of water to our planet. Researchers contend that since asteroids formed closer to our sun they had a much greater chance of hitting Earth during its earliest eons. After being battered for hundreds of millions of years, enough water had accumulated to form our oceans. Or so the theory goes.
The jury is still out as to what object seeded the Earth’s oceans. In the coming months more data from a slew of instruments will pour into labs across the globe. Maybe then we’ll have a better idea of how our planet evolved.
Image Courtesy of ESA