“Dark comets” are more common than previously thought and may have brought water to Earth … [+]
Where does Earth’s water come from? About 71% of the Earth’s surface is oceans, which contain 97% of the Earth’s water. The human body is 55-60% water. Its origin is the missing link in scientists’ understanding of the history of our planet and the life on it.
A new paper published earlier this month by Icarus argues that a new group of space rocks called “dark comets” are more common than previously thought and may have brought water to Earth long ago. A newly described type of near-Earth object—comets and asteroids whose solar paths bring them close to Earth—dark comets are unusually fast asteroids, giving off the idea that they might shoot out jets of gas, like comets do. It is a new class of matter somewhere between an asteroid and a comet.
Icy Bodies
The study, which examined seven dark comets, estimates that between 0.5 and 60% of all near-Earth objects may be dark comets from the asteroid belt. These dark comets appear to contain ice—something that asteroids do not—although there is evidence that ice exists on some asteroids in the large asteroid belt between of Jupiter and Mars. “We think these objects come from the inner and/or outer belt of the asteroid, and the implication of that is that this is another way to introduce ice into the inner solar system,” said Aster Taylor, lead author of the paper. graduate student in astronomy at the University of Michigan. “There may be more ice in the inner belt than we thought. There may be more like this out there.”
“Dark comets” are somewhere between an asteroid and a comet.
The Asteroid Belt
Whether Earth’s water comes from dark comets is still unknown because the timescales make it difficult to find evidence. “Near-Earth objects don’t stay in orbit for long because the near-Earth environment is chaotic,” said Taylor. “They’ve only lived in the near-Earth environment for about 10 million years.” The solar system is about 4.5 billion years old.
Research shows that the main asteroid belt is the main source of near-Earth matter.
“We don’t know if these dark comets brought water to Earth. We can’t say that. But we can say that there is still a debate as to how exactly the Earth’s water got here,” said Taylor. “The work we’ve done has shown that this is another way to move ice from one part of the solar system to the Earth’s atmosphere.”
The Solar system has a Main Asteroid Belt roughly between Mars and Jupiter.
Water Years
Research in 2023 suggested that all water on Earth is older than the Sun. Scientists have found at least 1,200 times the amount of water in all of Earth’s oceans around a very young star in the early stages of its evolution 1,305 light-years from the solar system in the Orion constellation. That supports the idea that water comes from interstellar space, the gaseous, dusty regions between stars. It shows that the water in our solar system formed billions of years before the sun arrived.
Various studies have shown that the water on Earth does not come from meteorites – debris from a comet, asteroid or meteoroid that hits the Earth – which was found to be one of the driest materials ever measured.
Another paper describing the discovery of salt crystals in samples of the asteroid Itokawa—brought to Earth in 2010 by the Japanese Hayabusa mission—supports the idea that all the water on Earth’s surface comes from the asteroid.
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