Space dust and the sun are among the amazing reasons for the abundance of water on Earth

“The Curtin University atomic probe tomography system is world-class, but it’s never been used in the kind of hydrogen analysis we’ve been doing here,” Daly said. “We wanted to make sure that the results we saw were accurate.”

“I presented our preliminary results at the Planetary and Lunar Science Conference in 2018, and asked if there were any colleagues present who would like to help us validate our findings with their own samples. The center, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and the University of Virginia, offered Northern Arizona University, Purdue University, Idha National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories all volunteered to provide us with samples of similar radioactive metals helium and deuterium instead of hydrogen. Daly said.

“The colleagues who have given us their support in this research are really a dream team for space weathering, so we are really excited about the evidence we have collected. They can open the door to a much better understanding of how the early solar system looked like.” Daly added.

“Only a decade ago, the idea that irradiation from the solar wind is relevant to the origin of water in the solar system, especially that it is closely related to Earth’s oceans, was met with great skepticism. Evidence that water is produced in situ on the surface of an asteroid, depends Our study provides mounting evidence that the interaction of the solar wind with oxygen-rich dust grains produces water,” said John Bradley.

Bradley is a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and one of the authors of the new study.

“Because exposure to dust that was scattered throughout the solar nebula was inevitable before the onset of planetary accumulation of radiation, the water generated by this mechanism has a direct link to the origin of water in planetary systems and perhaps also to the isotopic composition of the Earth,” Bradley said.