meteorites

Where did Earth’s water come from? Not melted meteorites, according to scientists

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University of Maryland The dashed white line in this illustration shows the boundary between the inner solar system and outer solar system, with the asteroid belt positioned roughly in between Mars and Jupiter. A bubble near the top of the image shows water molecules attached to a rocky fragment, demonstrating the kind of object that could have carried water to Earth.

Water makes up 71% of Earth’s surface, but no one knows how or when such massive quantities of water arrived on Earth.

A new study published in the journal Nature brings scientists one step closer to answering that question. Led by University of Maryland Assistant Professor of Geology Megan Newcombe, researchers analyzed melted meteorites that had been floating around in space since the solar system‘s formation 4 1/2 billion years ago. They found that these meteorites had extremely low water content—in fact, they were among the driest extraterrestrial materials ever measured.

These results, which let researchers rule them out as the primary source of Earth’s water, could have important implications for the search for water—and life—on other planets. It also helps researchers understand the unlikely conditions that aligned to make Earth a habitable planet.

“We wanted to understand how our planet managed to get water because it’s not completely obvious,” Newcombe said. “Getting water and having surface oceans on a planet that is small and relatively near the sun is a challenge.”

The team of researchers analyzed seven melted, or achondrite, meteorites that crashed into Earth billions of years after splintering from at least five planetesimals—objects that collided to form the planets in our solar system. In a process known as melting, many of these planetesimals were heated up by the decay of radioactive elements in the early solar system’s history, causing them to separate into layers with a crust, mantle and core.

Because these meteorites fell to Earth only recently, this experiment was the first time anyone had ever measured their volatiles. UMD geology graduate student Liam Peterson used an electron microprobe to measure their levels of magnesium, iron, calcium and silicon, then joined Newcombe at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Earth and Planets Laboratory to measure their water contents with a secondary ion mass spectrometry instrument.

“The challenge of analyzing water in extremely dry materials is that any terrestrial water on the sample’s surface or inside the measuring instrument can easily be detected, tainting the results,” said study co-author Conel Alexander, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science.

To reduce contamination, researchers first baked their samples in a low-temperature vacuum oven to remove any surface water. Before the samples could be analyzed in the secondary ion mass spectrometer, the samples had to be dried out once again.

“I had to leave the samples under a turbo pump—a really high-quality vacuum—for more than a month to draw down the terrestrial water enough,” Newcombe said.

Some of their meteorite samples came from the inner solar system, where Earth is located and where conditions are generally assumed to have been warm and dry. Other rarer samples came from the colder, icier outer reaches of our planetary system. While it was generally thought that water came to Earth from the outer solar system, it has yet to be determined what types of objects could have carried that water across the solar system.

“We knew that plenty of outer solar system objects were differentiated, but it was sort of implicitly assumed that because they were from the outer solar system, they must also contain a lot of water,” said Sune Nielsen, a study co-author and geologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “Our paper shows this is definitely not the case. As soon as meteorites melt, there is no remaining water.”

After analyzing the achondrite meteorite samples, researchers discovered that water comprised less than two millionths of their mass. For comparison, the wettest meteorites—a group called carbonaceous chondrites—contain up to about 20% of water by weight, or 100,000 times more than the meteorite samples studied by Newcombe and her co-authors.

This means that the heating and melting of planetesimals leads to near-total water loss, regardless of where these planetesimals originated in the solar system and how much water they started out with. Newcombe and her co-authors discovered that, contrary to popular belief, not all outer solar system objects are rich in water. This led them to conclude that water was likely delivered to Earth via unmelted, or chondritic, meteorites.

Newcombe said their findings have applications beyond geology. Scientists of many disciplines—and especially exoplanet researchers—are interested in the origin of Earth’s water because of its deep connections with life.

“Water is considered to be an ingredient for life to be able to flourish, so as we’re looking out into the universe and finding all of these exoplanets, we’re starting to work out which of those planetary systems could be potential hosts for life,” Newcombe said. “In order to be able to understand these other solar systems, we want to understand our own.”

The research paper, “Degassing of early-formed planetesimals restricted water delivery to Earth,” was published in Nature on March 15, 2023.

Where did Earth’s water come from? Not melted meteorites, according to scientists

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The dashed white line in this illustration shows the boundary between the inner solar system and outer solar system, with the asteroid belt positioned roughly in between Mars and Jupiter. A bubble near the top of the image shows water molecules attached to a rocky fragment, demonstrating the kind of object that could have carried water to Earth. Credit: Jack Cook/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Water makes up 71% of Earth’s surface, but no one knows how or when such massive quantities of water arrived on Earth.

A new study published in the journal Nature brings scientists one step closer to answering that question. Led by University of Maryland Assistant Professor of Geology Megan Newcombe, researchers analyzed melted meteorites that had been floating around in space since the solar system‘s formation 4 1/2 billion years ago. They found that these meteorites had extremely low water content—in fact, they were among the driest extraterrestrial materials ever measured.

These results, which let researchers rule them out as the primary source of Earth’s water, could have important implications for the search for water—and life—on other planets. It also helps researchers understand the unlikely conditions that aligned to make Earth a habitable planet.

“We wanted to understand how our planet managed to get water because it’s not completely obvious,” Newcombe said. “Getting water and having surface oceans on a planet that is small and relatively near the sun is a challenge.”

The team of researchers analyzed seven melted, or achondrite, meteorites that crashed into Earth billions of years after splintering from at least five planetesimals—objects that collided to form the planets in our solar system. In a process known as melting, many of these planetesimals were heated up by the decay of radioactive elements in the early solar system’s history, causing them to separate into layers with a crust, mantle and core.

Because these meteorites fell to Earth only recently, this experiment was the first time anyone had ever measured their volatiles. UMD geology graduate student Liam Peterson used an electron microprobe to measure their levels of magnesium, iron, calcium and silicon, then joined Newcombe at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Earth and Planets Laboratory to measure their water contents with a secondary ion mass spectrometry instrument.

“The challenge of analyzing water in extremely dry materials is that any terrestrial water on the sample’s surface or inside the measuring instrument can easily be detected, tainting the results,” said study co-author Conel Alexander, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science.

To reduce contamination, researchers first baked their samples in a low-temperature vacuum oven to remove any surface water. Before the samples could be analyzed in the secondary ion mass spectrometer, the samples had to be dried out once again.

“I had to leave the samples under a turbo pump—a really high-quality vacuum—for more than a month to draw down the terrestrial water enough,” Newcombe said.

Some of their meteorite samples came from the inner solar system, where Earth is located and where conditions are generally assumed to have been warm and dry. Other rarer samples came from the colder, icier outer reaches of our planetary system. While it was generally thought that water came to Earth from the outer solar system, it has yet to be determined what types of objects could have carried that water across the solar system.

“We knew that plenty of outer solar system objects were differentiated, but it was sort of implicitly assumed that because they were from the outer solar system, they must also contain a lot of water,” said Sune Nielsen, a study co-author and geologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “Our paper shows this is definitely not the case. As soon as meteorites melt, there is no remaining water.”

After analyzing the achondrite meteorite samples, researchers discovered that water comprised less than two millionths of their mass. For comparison, the wettest meteorites—a group called carbonaceous chondrites—contain up to about 20% of water by weight, or 100,000 times more than the meteorite samples studied by Newcombe and her co-authors.

This means that the heating and melting of planetesimals leads to near-total water loss, regardless of where these planetesimals originated in the solar system and how much water they started out with. Newcombe and her co-authors discovered that, contrary to popular belief, not all outer solar system objects are rich in water. This led them to conclude that water was likely delivered to Earth via unmelted, or chondritic, meteorites.

Newcombe said their findings have applications beyond geology. Scientists of many disciplines—and especially exoplanet researchers—are interested in the origin of Earth’s water because of its deep connections with life.

“Water is considered to be an ingredient for life to be able to flourish, so as we’re looking out into the universe and finding all of these exoplanets, we’re starting to work out which of those planetary systems could be potential hosts for life,” Newcombe said. “In order to be able to understand these other solar systems, we want to understand our own.”

DATING THE MOON-FORMING IMPACT EVENT WITH METEORITES

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Through a combination of data analysis and numerical modeling work, researchers have found a record of the ancient Moon-forming giant impact observable in stony meteorites. Their work will appear in the April 2015 issue of the Journal Science. The work was done by NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) researchers led by Principal Investigator Bill Bottke of the Institute for the Science of Exploration Targets (ISET) team at the Southwest Research Institute and included Tim Swindle, director of the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

The inner Solar System’s biggest known collision was the Moon-forming giant impact between a large protoplanet and the proto-Earth. The timing of this giant impact, however, is uncertain, with the ages of the most ancient lunar samples returned by the Apollo astronauts still being debated. Numerical simulations of the giant impact indicate this event not only created a disk of debris near Earth that formed the Moon, but it also ejected huge amounts of debris completely out of the Earth-Moon system. The fate of this material, comprising as much as several percent of an Earth mass, has not been closely examined until recently. However, it is likely some of it blasted main belt asteroids, with a record plausibly left behind in their near-surface rocks. Collisions on these asteroids in more recent times delivered these shocked remnants to Earth, which scientists have now used to date the age of the Moon.

The research indicates numerous kilometer-sized fragments from the giant impact struck main belt asteroids at much higher velocities than typical main belt collisions, heating the surface and leaving behind a permanent record of the impact event. Evidence that the giant impact produced a large number of kilometer-sized fragments can be inferred from laboratory and numerical impact experiments, the ancient lunar impact record itself, and the numbers and sizes of fragments produced by major main belt asteroid collisions.

Once the team concluded that pieces of the Moon-forming impact hit main belt asteroids and left a record of shock heating events in some meteorites, they set out to deduce both the timing and the relative magnitude of the bombardment. By modeling the evolution of giant impact debris over time and fitting the results to ancient impact heat signatures in stony meteorites, the team was able to infer the Moon formed about 4.47 billion years ago, in agreement with many previous estimates. The most ancient Solar System materials found in meteorites are about one hundred million years older than this age.

Insights into the last stages of planet formation in the inner solar system can be gleaned from these impact signatures. For example, the team is exploring how they can be used to place new constraints on how many asteroid-like bodies still existed in the inner Solar System in the aftermath of planet formation. They can also help researchers deduce the earliest bombardment history of ancient bodies like Vesta, one of the targets of NASA’s Dawn mission and a main belt asteroid whose fragments were delivered to Earth in the form of meteorites. It is even possible that tiny remnants of the Moon-forming impactor or proto-Earth might still be found within meteorites that show signs of shock heating by giant impact debris. This would allow scientists to explore for the first time the unknown primordial nature of our homeworld.

Co-author Swindle, who specializes in finding the times when meteorites or lunar samples were involved in large collisions, said: “Bill Bottke had the idea of looking at the asteroid belt to see what effect a Moon-forming giant impact would have, and realized that you would expect a lot of collisions in the period shortly after that.

“Here at LPL, we had been determining ages of impact events that affected meteorites, and when we got together, we found that our data matched his predictions,” he added. “It’s a great example of taking advantage of groups that work in two different specialties – orbital dynamics and chronology – and combining their expertise.”

Intriguingly, some debris may have also returned to hit the Earth and Moon after remaining in solar orbit over timescales ranging from tens of thousands of years to 400 million years.

“The importance of giant impact ejecta returning to strike the Moon could also play an intriguing role in the earliest phase of lunar bombardment,” said Bottke, who is an alumnus of the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. “This research is helping to refine our time scales for ‘what happened when’ on other worlds in the Solar System.”

Yvonne Pendleton, Director of the NASA SSERVI Institute, notes: “This is an excellent example of the power of multidisciplinary science. By linking studies of the Moon, of main belt asteroids, and of meteorites that fall to Earth, we gain a better understanding of the earliest history of our Solar System.”

A twist on planetary origins: Meteorites were byproducts of planetary formation, not building blocks .

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Meteors that have crashed to Earth have long been regarded as relics of the early solar system. These craggy chunks of metal and rock are studded with chondrules — tiny, glassy, spherical grains that were once molten droplets. Scientists have thought that chondrules represent early kernels of terrestrial planets: As the solar system started to coalesce, these molten droplets collided with bits of gas and dust to form larger planetary precursors. However, researchers have now found that chondrules may have played less of a fundamental role. Based on computer simulations, the group concludes that chondrules were not building blocks, but rather byproducts of a violent and messy planetary process.
An artist’s rendering of a protoplanetary impact. Early in the impact, molten jetted material is ejected at a high velocity and breaks up to form chondrules, the millimeter-scale, formerly molten droplets found in most meteorites. These droplets cool and solidify over hours to days.

Meteors that have crashed to Earth have long been regarded as relics of the early solar system. These craggy chunks of metal and rock are studded with chondrules — tiny, glassy, spherical grains that were once molten droplets. Scientists have thought that chondrules represent early kernels of terrestrial planets: As the solar system started to coalesce, these molten droplets collided with bits of gas and dust to form larger planetary precursors.

However, researchers at MIT and Purdue University have now found that chondrules may have played less of a fundamental role. Based on computer simulations, the group concludes that chondrules were not building blocks, but rather byproducts of a violent and messy planetary process.

The team found that bodies as large as the moon likely existed well before chondrules came on the scene. In fact, the researchers found that chondrules were most likely created by the collision of such moon-sized planetary embryos: These bodies smashed together with such violent force that they melted a fraction of their material, and shot a molten plume out into the solar nebula. Residual droplets would eventually cool to form chondrules, which in turn attached to larger bodies — some of which would eventually impact Earth, to be preserved as meteorites.

Brandon Johnson, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, says the findings revise one of the earliest chapters of the solar system.

“This tells us that meteorites aren’t actually representative of the material that formed planets — they’re these smaller fractions of material that are the byproduct of planet formation,” Johnson says. “But it also tells us the early solar system was more violent than we expected: You had these massive sprays of molten material getting ejected out from these really big impacts. It’s an extreme process.”

Johnson and his colleagues, including Maria Zuber, the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics and MIT’s vice president for research, have published their results this week in the journal Nature.

High-velocity molten rock

To get a better sense of the role of chondrules in a fledgling solar system, the researchers first simulated collisions between protoplanets — rocky bodies between the size of an asteroid and the moon. The team modeled all the different types of impacts that might occur in an early solar system, including their location, timing, size, and velocity. They found that bodies the size of the moon formed relatively quickly, within the first 10,000 years, before chondrules were thought to have appeared.

Johnson then used another model to determine the type of collision that could melt and eject molten material. From these simulations, he determined that a collision at a velocity of 2.5 kilometers per second would be forceful enough to produce a plume of melt that is ejected out into space — a phenomenon known as impact jetting.

“Once the two bodies collide, a very small amount of material is shocked up to high temperature, to the point where it can melt,” Johnson says. “Then this really hot material shoots out from the collision point.”

The team then estimated the number of impact-jetting collisions that likely occurred in a solar system’s first 5 million years — the period of time during which it’s believed that chondrules first appeared. From these results, Johnson and his team found that such collisions would have produced enough chondrules in the asteroid belt region to explain the number that have been detected in meteorites today.

Falling into place

To go a step further, the researchers ran a third simulation to calculate chondrules’ cooling rate. Previous experiments in the lab have shown that chondrules cool down at a rate of 10 to 1,000 kelvins per hour — a rate that would produce the texture of chondrules seen in meteorites. Johnson and his colleagues used a radiative transfer model to simulate the impact conditions required to produce such a cooling rate. They found that bodies colliding at 2.5 kilometers per second would indeed produce molten droplets that, ejected into space, would cool at 10 to 1,000 kelvins per hour.

“Then I had this ‘Eureka!’ moment where I realized that jetting during these really big impacts could possibly explain the formation of chondrules,” Johnson says. “It all fell into place.”

Going forward, Johnson plans to look into the effects of other types of impacts. The group has so far modeled vertical impacts — bodies colliding straight-on. Johnson predicts that oblique impacts, or collisions occurring at an angle, may be even more efficient at producing molten plumes of chondrules. He also hopes to explore what happens to chondrules once they are launched into the solar nebula.

“Chondrules were long viewed as planetary building blocks,” Zuber notes. “It’s ironic that they now appear to be the remnants of early protoplanetary collisions.”

Fred Ciesla, associate professor of planetary science at the University of Chicago, says the findings may reclassify chondrites, a class of meteorites that are thought to be examples of the original material from which planets formed.

“This would be a major shift in how people think about our solar system,” says Ciesla, who did not contribute to the research. “If this finding is correct, then it would suggest that chondrites are not good analogs for the building blocks of the Earth and other planets. Meteorites as a whole are still important clues about what processes occurred during the formation of the Solar System, but which ones are the best analogs for what the planets were made out of would change.”

This research was funded in part by NASA.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The original article was written by Jennifer Chu. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:

  1. Brandon C. Johnson, David A. Minton, H. J. Melosh & Maria T. Zuber. Impact jetting as the origin of chondrules. Nature, 2014 DOI: 10.1038/nature14105

Vitamin B3 might have been made in space, delivered to Earth by meteorites.

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Ancient Earth might have had an extraterrestrial supply of vitamin B3 delivered by carbon-rich meteorites, according to a new analysis by NASA-funded researchers. The result supports a theory that the origin of life may have been assisted by a supply of key molecules created in space and brought to Earth by comet and meteor impacts.

“It is always difficult to put a value on the connection between meteorites and the origin of life; for example, earlier work has shown that vitamin B3 could have been produced non-biologically on ancient Earth, but it’s possible that an added source of vitamin B3 could have been helpful,” said Karen Smith of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pa. “Vitamin B3, also called nicotinic acid or niacin, is a precursor to NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide), which is essential to metabolism and likely very ancient in origin.” Smith is lead author of a paper on this research, along with co-authors from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., now available online in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. 

This is not the first time vitamin B3 has been found in meteorites. In 2001 a team led by Sandra Pizzarello of Arizona State University, in Tempe discovered it along with related  called pyridine carboxylic acids in the Tagish Lake . 

In the new work at Goddard’s Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory, Smith and her team analyzed samples from eight different carbon-rich meteorites, called “CM-2 type carbonaceous chondrites” and found vitamin B3 at levels ranging from about 30 to 600 parts-per-billion. They also found other pyridine carboxylic acids at similar concentrations and, for the first time, found pyridine dicarboxylic acids. 

“We discovered a pattern – less vitamin B3 (and other pyridine carboxylic acids) was found in meteorites that came from asteroids that were more altered by . One possibility may be that these molecules were destroyed during the prolonged contact with liquid water,” said Smith. “We also performed preliminary laboratory experiments simulating conditions in interstellar space and showed that the synthesis of vitamin B3 and other pyridine carboxylic acids might be possible on ice grains.” 

Scientists think the solar system formed when a dense cloud of gas, dust, and ice grains collapsed under its own gravity. Clumps of dust and ice aggregated into comets and asteroids, some of which collided together to form moon-sized objects or planetesimals, and some of those eventually merged to become planets. 

Space is filled with radiation from nearby stars as well as from violent events in deep space like exploding stars and black holes devouring matter. This radiation could have powered chemical reactions in the cloud (nebula) that formed the solar system, and some of those reactions may have produced biologically important molecules like vitamin B3. 

Asteroids and comets are considered more or less pristine remnants from our solar system’s formation, and many meteorites are prized samples from asteroids that happen to be conveniently delivered to Earth. However, some asteroids are less pristine than others. Asteroids can be altered shortly after they form by chemical reactions in liquid water. As they grow, asteroids incorporate radioactive material present in the solar system nebula. If enough radioactive material accumulates in an , the heat produced as it decays will be sufficient to melt ice inside the asteroid. Researchers can determine how much an asteroid was altered by water by examining chemical and mineralogical signatures of water alteration in meteorites from those asteroids. 

When asteroids collide with meteoroids or other asteroids, pieces break off and some of them eventually make their way to Earth as meteorites. Although meteorites are valued samples from asteroids, they are rarely recovered immediately after they fall to Earth. This leaves them vulnerable to contamination from terrestrial chemistry and life. 

The team doubts the vitamin B3 and other molecules found in their meteorites came from terrestrial life for two reasons. First, the vitamin B3 was found along with its structural isomers – related molecules that have the same chemical formula but whose atoms are attached in a different order. These other molecules aren’t used by life. Non-biological chemistry tends to produce a wide variety of molecules—basically everything permitted by the materials and conditions present—but life makes only the molecules it needs. If contamination from terrestrial life was the source of the vitamin B3 in the meteorites, then only the vitamin should have been found, not the other, related molecules. 

Second, the amount of vitamin B3 found was related to how much the parent asteroids had been altered by water. This correlation with conditions on the asteroids would be unlikely if the vitamin came from contamination on Earth. 

The team plans to conduct additional interstellar chemistry experiments under more realistic conditions to better understand how vitamin B3 can form on  in space. “We used pyridine-carbon dioxide ice in the initial experiment,” said Smith. “We want to add water ice (the dominant component of interstellar ices) and start from simpler organic precursors (building-block molecules) of B3 to help verify our result.”