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Two Different Sources of Water for the Early Solar Nebula

Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres volume 42, pages 81–92 (2012)Cite this article

Abstract

Water is essential for life. This is a trivial fact but has profound implications since the forming of life on the early Earth required water. The sources of water and the related amount of delivery depend not only on the conditions on the early Earth itself but also on the evolutionary history of the solar system. Thus we ask where and when water formed in the solar nebula—the precursor of the solar system. In this paper we explore the chemical mechanics for water formation and its expected abundance. This is achieved by studying the parental cloud core of the solar nebula and its gravitational collapse. We have identified two different sources of water for the region of Earth’s accretion. The first being the sublimation of the icy mantles of dust grains formed in the parental cloud. The second source is located in the inner region of the collapsing cloud core - the so-called hot corino with a temperature of several hundred Kelvin. There, water is produced efficiently in the gas phase by reactions between neutral molecules. Additionally, we analyse the dependence of the production of water on the initial abundance ratio between carbon and oxygen.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Helmholtz Alliance as part of the project ‘Planetary Evolution and Life’.

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  1. German Aerospace Center, Institute of Planetary Research, Rutherfordstr. 2, 12489, Berlin, Germany

    Stefan Kupper, Carmen Tornow & Philipp Gast

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  1. Stefan Kupper
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  2. Carmen Tornow
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  3. Philipp Gast
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Correspondence to Stefan Kupper.

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Kupper, S., Tornow, C. & Gast, P. Two Different Sources of Water for the Early Solar Nebula. Orig Life Evol Biosph 42, 81–92 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11084-012-9280-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11084-012-9280-7

Keywords

  • Water
  • Astrochemistry
  • Prebiotic molecules
  • Solar nebula
  • Hot corino