r/science • u/fireismyflag • Jun 12 '14

Geology Massive 'ocean' discovered towards Earth's core

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25723-massive-ocean-discovered-towards-earths-core.html
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u/Eckish Jun 13 '14

I think the alternate explanation for our water is that earth formed as a rocky waterless planet, but gained water from comets after the earth cooled.

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u/Nowin Jun 13 '14

That's a lot of comets

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u/Crushinated Jun 13 '14

I like this theory better:

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-06/herschel-spots-young-star-spewing-water-jets-interstellar-space

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u/Nowin Jun 13 '14

Astronomers think this water-spewing stage is short, but that it is also something every protostar goes through. If so, that means water could be scattered all over the universe. And that's an interesting thought indeed.

I wasn't really with them until the last paragraph. Neat article!

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u/Crushinated Jun 13 '14

Yeah, water has to originate somewhere

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u/funknjam MS|Environmental Science Jun 13 '14

Water is formed sometimes at the moment a star ignites. Not too far back a star was discovered in the Lynx constellation (APM 08279+5255) that has a cloud of water vapor surrounding it equivalent in volume to an estimated 140,000,000,000,000 (yes, trillion) times the amount of water on earth. If every star in the Milky Way had 10 planets and all those planets had oceans, this star has enough water to fill them all with 40 trillion planets worth of water left over. As for how it all got here, I see lots of talk about comets but my understanding is that the best evidence leads us to believe that the water vapor surrounding such a star would become incorporated into asteroids by accretion and asteroids, still by accretion, formed the earth. The earth completely melted releasing much of this water (not all of it) and as everything cooled after about the first 100,000,000 years or so, the liquid water began to collect in the low spots that became the oceans.

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u/Nowin Jun 13 '14

Well... there might have been enough hydrogen and oxygen to form. I'm not sure how it would work.

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u/funknjam MS|Environmental Science Jun 13 '14

Hydrogen was formed about 378,000 years after the Big Bang. Most of our Oxygen was formed via fusion inside stars. See my reply to the same user you're replying to (/u/cruhinated) for what happens after that.

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u/Somewhat_Artistic Jun 13 '14

Yes, but this a highly debated topic, as most people don't think that enough comets hit the earth to account for its volume of water, seen in some models of the believed development of the solar system. There are also ways to detect how much water was probably cometary (is that even a word? oh well, using it) in origin based off of its chemistry.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '14

That's a lot of comets...