Brown University | via phys.org | 2018 Apr 25
Experiments using a high-powered projectile cannon show how impacts by water-rich asteroids can deliver surprising amounts of water to planetary bodies. The research, by scientists from Brown University, could shed light on how water got to the early Earth and help account for some trace water detections on the Moon and elsewhere.
"The origin and transportation of water and volatiles is one of the big questions in planetary science," said Terik Daly, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University who led the research while completing his Ph.D. at Brown. "These experiments reveal a mechanism by which asteroids could deliver water to moons, planets and other asteroids. It's a process that started while the solar system was forming and continues to operate today." ...
The source of Earth's water remains something of a mystery. It was long thought that the planets of the inner solar system formed bone dry and that water was delivered later by icy comet impacts. While that idea remains a possibility, isotopic measurements have shown that Earth's water is similar to water bound up in carbonaceous asteroids. That suggests asteroids could also have been a source for Earth's water, but how such delivery might have worked isn't well understood. ...
The delivery of water by impacts from planetary accretion to present - R. Terik Daly, Peter H. Schultz
- Science Advances 4(4):eaar2632 (25 Apr 2018) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aar2632
