Rosetta Comet’s Water is Different Than Earth’s
The mystery behind the origin of oceans on Earth still needs to be resolved. But since the European spacecraft Rosetta caught up with a comet with water like content, scientists believe that they have found an important piece of this puzzle. Until now it was believed that water in the oceans came from comets, but after the analysis of this particular comet, the hypothesis is losing its credibility.
That’s because the water we have found on the comet is different from the water we have on Earth. Comet water shows a high deuterium (a form of hydrogen with an additional neutron) to hydrogen ratio unlike the water we have in our oceans. Now that the science community has rejected the previous hypothesis, they are bound to point fingers at another suspect – asteroids. However, more data is needed before making any final conclusions.
Our planet was born approx 4.6 billion years ago and it is believed that it originally had water, but since the temperature used to be extremely high at that time, that water would have boiled off. Scientists are still trying to figure out how our planet got such a vast amount of water (70 percent of the total).
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