Human beings have always obsessed over whether they are alone in the universe. Now scientists say theyve proved that at least some of the water on Earth has to have originated from outside the solar system (and they add that its older than the sun).

The news has set the flying-saucer-sphere abuzz with the thought that other planets in the universe are therefore more likely to have had water, at some stage at least, and to therefore have developed life.

That however is not claimed by the paper published in Science Magazine on September 26, when life forms in Israel were celebration the new Jewish year.

It isnt news that water in the solar system is older than the sun, explains Prof. Morris Podolak of Tel Aviv Universitys Department of Geosciences, an expert on planetology and the evolution of comets: it had to be. What is news is that the water on earth cannot have originated in the protoplanetary nebular disk from which the planets, including Earth, formed.

It all started with the big bang

Current thinking is that the universe began with the big bang, which created mainly hydrogen and some helium, Podolak explains. Things like oxygen and other heavier elements were made in secondary processes, like inside stars, which threw out the material. Our sun is second-generation, made of material that originated with an earlier generation of stars, he says.

In other words, our sun was formed already including heavier elements such as carbon and oxygen made after the big bang but before the suns birth, Podolak explains.

Moreover, the universe has a huge amount of hydrogen, a lot of helium and the third most prevalent element is oxygen, says Podolak. Water consists of hydrogen and oxygen (two hydrogen atoms to one of oxygen, to be accurate).

So the interstellar void in which the solar system, and Earth, formed had water bobbing about that would by definition be older than the sun. We would expect water to be abundant in that void, says Podolak.

The weird thing discovered by the team headed by Ilsedore Cleeves of the University of Michigans Astronomy department is that the water on Earth doesnt have the same chemical signature deuterium-to-hydrogen enrichment as primordial water in the solar system. Nor could processes in that disk have created the signature of the water on earth, the team says. So the question is where it came from.

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Water on earth originated outside the solar system, scientists prove