Ice-covered pebbles drifted inward from the outer Solar System, and as they reached the warmer inner Solar System, the water sublimated into vapour. The vapour and the pebbles were both accreted into young planets. This is known as the icy pebble drift theory
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has observed that ice-covered pebbles from outer solar systems deliver water to still-forming planets closer to their stars. This observation supports a long-proposed theory of planet formation.
The JWST found that in one of the compact disks, ice-covered pebbles that drift inward toward the warmer region closer to the star are unimpeded. Their ice turns into vapor as the ice-covered pebbles cross the snowline. This provides a large amount of water to enrich the rocky, inner planets.
The results confirmed expectations by revealing excess cool water in the compact disks, compared with the large disks. As the pebbles drift, any time they encounter a pressure bump — an increase in pressure — they tend to collect there.
The theory goes that the sublimating stream of pebbles continue to snow down from the beyond, they provide both solids and water to create the seeds of a new planet.
Earth is the only known astronomical object with liquid water on its surface. However, there are several exoplanets that have the right conditions to support liquid water.
NASA calls these places “ocean worlds”. In our solar system, there is evidence of oceans on:
- Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus
- Jupiter’s moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto
- Neptune’s moon Triton
- Pluto
Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s moon Europa appear to have salty, liquid oceans covered with thick layers of ice at the surface. Scientists have observed water plumes erupting from Enceladus, and believe similar plumes can be found on Europa.
Other planets with water include:
- Mars
- Venus
- The Jovian planets
Water also exists in diverse forms on moons, dwarf planets, and even comets. For example, NASA has confirmed that water flows intermittently on the surface of Mars, and that there are two main reservoirs of frozen water at the polar caps of Mars.
Water can exist in space in different forms, such as ice, vapor, and liquid, depending on the temperature and pressure conditions.
Liquid water cannot exist in a vacuum because it instantly vaporizes and then freezes, forming tiny pieces of ice. You need an atmosphere to maintain enough pressure on the water to prevent boiling.
Water is available in space, but it is not as abundant as it is on Earth. Enormous amounts of water, in gaseous form, exist in the vast stellar nurseries of our galaxy. The Hubble Space Telescope peered into the Helix Nebula and found water molecules.
Scientists have also found a huge cloud of water vapor floating in space, located 30 billion miles away in a quasar. The water cloud is estimated to contain at least 140 trillion times the amount of water in all the seas and oceans on Earth.
The largest reservoir of water in the universe is a black hole that contains a reservoir of water as big as 140 trillion oceans. This is 4,000 times more than exists in the Milky Way. The water cloud is located 12-billion light years away, surrounding a black hole called quasar. The water cloud weighs more than 40 billion times the weight of Earth.
Most of the water in the universe is created by reactions on the surface of interstellar grains of dust. Water is a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, both of which are present in space. The first is in the composition of interstellar matter, and the second is remnants after the explosions of stars.
Ice-covered pebbles in space are believed to be the fundamental seeds of planet formation. The theory is that these icy solids form in the cold, outer regions of protoplanetary disks and drift inward toward the star due to friction in the gaseous disk. As they cross the snow line, their ice turns to vapor and provides a large amount of water to enrich the rocky planets forming there.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has delivered a breakthrough in planetary science by showing that this long-proposed theory is true
The outer planets and their moons formed farther from the sun, in a region where water, carbon dioxide, and other gases condensed into ice. Outside the frost line, temperatures are cooler and hydrogen compounds are able to condense into ices.
The ices that formed these planets were more plentiful than the metals and silicates that formed the terrestrial inner planets. This allowed them to grow massive enough to capture large atmospheres of hydrogen and helium, the lightest and most abundant elements.
Uranus and Neptune are called “ice giants” because they are much colder and have a higher abundance of atmospheric water and other ice-forming molecules. Comets have been called the “dirty snowballs” of our solar system because they are made of the same basic ingredients — ice and dust.
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