For Star subscribers: A salty discovery by scientists at the University of Arizona could bolster the idea that most, if not all, of the water on Earth was delivered here long ago inside of space rocks.
Henry Brean A salty discovery by scientists at the University of Arizona suggests water might be more common than previously thought on many asteroids in the solar system.
The analysis by Tom Zega and Shaofan Che from the UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory involved a single particle of dust, roughly twice the diameter of a human hair, that was collected from the near-Earth asteroid Itokawa in 2005 by Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft. To determine if the salt came from human sweat or some other terrestrial source, researchers cut a tiny section — smaller than a red blood cell — from the dust particle and subjected it to a number of techniques.The finding is significant, Zega said, because Itokawa is a type of asteroid that makes up about 87% of the meteorites collected on Earth but are rarely found to contain water-bearing minerals.
"In other words, the water here on Earth had to be delivered from the outer reaches of the solar nebula, where temperatures were much colder and allowed water to exist, most likely in the form of ice," Che said. Icy comets or asteroids from more distant reaches of the solar system are thought to be the most likely source, but the salt found hiding inside Itokawa hints at another, much closer cosmic watering hole.
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