Ice Discovered on Asteroid, Suggests Earth’s Oceans Came From Space
- By Alexis Madrigal
- April 28, 2010 |
- 4:50 pm |
- Categories: Space
Water ice and organic molecules have been discovered on the surface of an asteroid for the first time.
Researchers glimpsed the ice on 24 Themis, the largest member of an asteroid family located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, using the NASA Infrared Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. This frosty little rock could be the key to understanding how Earth became the blue planet.
“What we’ve found suggests that an asteroid like this one may have hit Earth and brought our planet its water,” said astronomer Humberto Campins of the University of Central Florida, the lead of one of the two separate teams that reported similar findings April 28 in Nature.
While there is plenty of debate around how Earth got its oceans, this new evidence suggests some of the water came from extraterrestrial sources. Here’s how it may have happened: More than four billion years ago, after a massive collision between Earth and another large object created the moon, our planet was completely dessicated. Then, during the Late Heavy Bombardment period that followed, during which lots of asteroids hit Earth, the ice that the objects carried became our store of water.
“The more we find in our asteroid belt objects that do have water, the more convinced we are that that was a possible process to rehydrate the earth,” said NASA astrobiologist Mary Voytek.
The ice on Themis 24 could be a sort of time capsule from the early solar system and could be similar to the ice that may have arrived on Earth from asteroids during the Heavy Bombardment.
“The ice that we see there, right now, is sort of related to the ice that could have come from the main asteroid belt that hit us about 4 billion years ago,” astronomer Henry Hsieh of Queen’s University Belfast told NPR. “It gives us a way to kind of probe the cousins of the asteroids that hit us and probably gave us water in the early stages of the Earth’s formation.” Hsieh wrote a commentary that accompanied the stories in Nature.
The presence of ice and organic molecules on the surface of an asteroid is the latest in a string of discoveries that collectively indicate water ice is a more common substance than we might have thought. In just the past few years, scientists have confirmed the presence of ice at the moon’s north pole as well as beneath the surface of Mars.
It had previously been thought that asteroids were too warm to retain water ice on their surfaces. The exact method for how they do so remains unclear.
Image: Artist’s conception of asteroid 24 Themis and two small fragments of this dynamic family, which resulted from a large impact more than one billion years ago. One of the small fragments is inert (as most asteroids are), and the other has a comet-like tail, produced by the sublimation of water ice from its surface.
Gabriel Pérez/Servicio MultiMedia, Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, Tenerife, Spain
See Also:
“Ice Discovered on Asteroid, Suggests Earth’s Oceans Came From Space”
Is this another sudo-science built on consensus, yes.
I would be more inclined to believe it if I read in the Bible “as God flooded the Earth meteors fell too” but it just says rain. So these atheists can go back to worshipping to their god, Darwin, idiots.
Now that is some imported water!
@regulas - not sure you’re one to be calling people idiots, friend. although i suppose there is truth in the old saying ‘takes one to know one’
I had no idea Darwin wrote about the formation of the solar system. Go Darwin! You rock more than I thought!
Sorry…saying water came from space doesn’t get these atheistic scientists off the hook. Water had to be created *somewhere*. May as well have been created here as somewhere else.
Maybe you meant PSEUDO Science. You should probably be a bit more conservative with the use of the word “idiot” because that kind of makes you look like…well…you know.
Aren’t you 4 billion years late with this news?
Didn’t everything on earth come from space at some point?
So did they actually SEE the organic molecules? I guess if you don’t believe in Creation, you have to come up with an explanation somehow, but I agree with the fact that this is absolutely pseudo-science… just theories that sound like fact. It takes more faith to believe in theories like this than it would to believe in a Creator
We can bottle it and charge $60 a bottle!!!
There is also the possibility that the water and organic matter originated on earth.
Hush up before some God talking googoo gaga
hear you say water is from outer space .
So a two-thousand year old document contains our only truth, and anyone who disagrees is an idiot? To be consistent then, you must reject benefits of our scientific understanding or else be an idiot, because we sure didn’t learn how to tame and use electricity from the bible. In fact we haven’t learned anything from religion, except for intolerance, nifty ways of torturing people, and hate. Unfortunately we can’t use Darwin as a god because rational people need actual proof as a source of belief.
Was this article linked on drudge or worldnetdaily or something? If you hate science, then stay the f out.
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I’m sorry, I never comment onanything as it is a monumental waste of energy, but, I couldn’t help myself with this. I really think it’s appalling that in the year 2010, there are still people who cling to fantasy “stories” and guide their lives by them. Creationism is a joke, I’ve had numerous conversations with individuals (including: Mormons, Catholics, jews, Muslims) and the story never changes. A magical man with infinite power and wisdom somehow only has the ability to tell his “story” thousands of years ago. And, even funnier (esp for you Catholics), is the fact that you have the audacity to say that god created us in his image. Hahaha. Guess what? You, and that half dead racoon in the street are literally biological “equivalents.” a human life is so insignificant in the grand scheme of things. We are not special. We are merely here because the planetary condition happened to be suited to develop life. It’s such a joke man, I hear people talking about the “cell machine” and “divine intervention” and I chuckle. You’ve decided to dedicate your life and existence to domething that is inherently flawed. Believe your bible, or Torah, or quran; all I know is that you spent a lifetime modeling yourself after a story. It helped you develop a set of guidelines ( which is the only positive to come from religion) that hold no scientific or real basis. But in reality, your scared. Your terrified that what you believe in is a sham. You’ve spent a lifetime hoping to enter the pearly gates, I truly hope you find them. But, snap back to reality, and yourrotting in the ground.
I think it’s a full moon. They’re over at the page here on dinosaur feathers, as well. There’s a raging loon there who demonstrates that they ought to certify these people to speak in public before they do so. This kind of spokesman isn’t winning them any friends, if that’s their goal.
Apologies if this ends up here twice. The first time I included the link to the other WIRED page, and it came back and told me that it was in moderation. Funny how the spammers get right in with their links. I guess the difference was that I put in the raw link, not camouflaged beneath text.
Another huge answer about the mysteries of our solar system from a nano bit of evidence.
It’s a great discovery but the hyped theories should be toned down.
mother nature made the oceans
@regulas- ok first of all if your going to call people idiots you might want to learn how to spell correct. its called PSEUDOscience. And pseuodoscience is something that is based on no research and just opinion such as astrology; which i am willing to bet you believe is REAL science. this is astronomy which is actually a science, one that you need to go to college and recieve a Phd to be able to research so i wouldn’t exactly call these people idiots. this THEORY was developed after a lot of research using telescopes and spectroscopy and tests repeated over and over to be sure they get the same results. And the phrase ‘its just a theory’ is also incorrect, a scientific theory is different than a philosophical theory which is just an idea. scientific theory is one that is made of many observations following scrict guidelines and repeatable tests that can’t be argued with. so when you say that god made it rain and created the oceans that ‘is just a theory’, it can’t be proven or tested. this scientific theory has been tested and has been proven. don’t get me wrong i’m not anti-god i just have a different belief than you.
I love how the religious intolerants along with the atheist intolerants can both agree that each other are “idiots”.
In the book of Genesis, it’s mentioned that God said “Let there be Light!” And thus the Big Bang some 13 to 14 billion years ago. I bet there was definitely a lot of light then.
As for the water failing as rain, I’m sure there’s some interpretation there as there’s sufficient scientific evidence that lots and lots of meteors did come crashing down after the collision with the Mars size planetoid, yet the Earth would’ve been still way too hot for the water to be in liquid form until the Earth cooled enough for the water to condense out of the atmosphere and come down as rain.
I’m not saying that a supreme being that caused our present Universe to come into being and caused everything to occur, but I refuse to disbelieve in one either.
Or some really big, huge space being was passing through our young solar system and, having recently chugged billions of gallons of beer, decided to piss all over our young planet.
But reading ‘regulas’ comment, all I can say is he is one of those idiots who refuses to believe in anything other than what he read in the Bible, a book that has gone through many revisions by mortal men who most assuredly changed the original text when translating from Hebrew into Ye ‘Old English by putting their own unscientific conjectures into the translation. And now we have clueless idiots like ‘regulas’ who obviously has no imagination and totally believes in what others tell him. I’m surprised he along with all the other religious intolerants will even consider using modern conveniences as computers, autos, airplanes, etc aren’t mentioned in the Bible.
Ok, Am I the only person who thinks something is wrong with the chain of events here? 1) Big rock hits Earth, Moon blasted free. 2) Large swarm of icy comets bombard Earth, 75% of surface covered in water as a result.
If this were so, and random factors being what they are, WHERE is all the ice on the Moon? An average number of asteroids must have hit the Moon as well as the Earth, under the proposed scenario above. A good portion of the Moon should have water (ice) too, shouldn’t it?
@TheRestOfTheStory- the moon cannot hold any water because it has no magnetic field. without a magnetic field the solar wind simply evaporates the water into space.
So which day was it that the water asteroid fell on? The world was created in 7 days yano. Let me see. First there was darkness. I can see that. I loath Mondays too. Tuesday, there was some stuff to do before you can have a planet for an asteroid to fall on. I’m just guessing here, but by Thursday there was probably too much done to mess it all up with a big ole water asteroid. So, this was probably a Wednesday asteroid. Then, 5000 years later, on a Wednesday I’m pretty sure, man forgot about all that and figured that the universe is way, way older and bigger and blamed Darwin for thinking crazy stuff. Which is silly because the God thing is much better with eternal afterlife and all. This is where the God people think Darwin people have a self serving ego. Then again, God people can float two of every animal on a boat which is pretty darn cool. Maybe that is when the water asteroid came. Must be. See how easy it is to figure stuff out and still prove the existence of God? It is Wednesday after all.
Well…Whats new? I thought that water did come from icy comets and asteroids from Father Uranus. What other options were there? I guess the Jewish God came along after the ocean was created. We all know that Oceanus was the Titan Son of Uranus(Father Sky..Space) and Gaia Earth.
My neighbor saw this article & calmly pointed out to me how silly it sounded, as everyone knows water comes from the tap in the kitchen, not outer space.
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I had to bite my lip and wonder WTF she had been smoking & if she would share.
.
But then I realized she actually has a legitimate excuse for this concept, as she’s 95 years old and quite senile.
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It sure seems it would take a LOT of asteroids to deliver a world this full of water…
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Maybe my elderly neighbor’s right. Maybe it did come from a tap in the kitchen.
Oh sure, sure. And I bet you sudo-scientists believe that water just spontaneously forms from the most abundant elements in the universe or something.
Kirk Cameron. That is all.
God created water so he could kill all life on earth and save Noah and some dinosaurs in a big boat. Then he gave us Kirk Cameron. Also, don’t play with your penis because Jesus of Nazareth is keeping tally on a big felt board in the clouds.
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God’s perfect plan!
Also, everyone knows the moon blasted free in 1999.
@regulas
>> sudo-science built on consensus
You look foolish. I mean, if I said “Find the creationist, Internet Explorer user.” - you would be everybody’s first pick.
Here’s a two step suggestion.
1 Google:
firefox download
2 And then google:
firefox spell check
That will fix some of your minor problems.
Science isn’t based on consensus. You may have confused science with dangerous anti-intellectualism that does in fact tend to function by consensus.
Another suggestion - you should find a good book on science and read it.