The water was born as a result of stars exploding
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The first water molecules may only have formed 100 to 200 million years after the Big Bang – even before the first galaxies – by launching a process that led to life on earth … and perhaps elsewhere.
Shortly after Big Bang, most of the question of the universe was hydrogen and helium, with only traces of other lighter elements, such as lithium. Heavier elements like oxygen did not yet exist, which makes water formation impossible.
These initial elements met in the first stars, which then produced heavier elements through nuclear merger Including, above all, oxygen. When these stars have reached the end of their lives, they exploded like supernovae, releasing these heavier elements and allowing oxygen to mix and combine with preexisting hydrogen to create H2O – Water.
Previous research has shown that even the relatively low quantities of oxygen produced in the first stars could have made water molecules, but so far, no one had simulated exactly what would happen when a primordial star went supernova and how the elements he released would mix with the cosmological environment in which the star has formed, says, says the elements Daniel Whalen at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. “To do something less, you really don't know what's going on,” he says.
To investigate, Whalen and his team used computer models to simulate the birth and death of the first stars in a realistic context. It is believed that these first stars have varied 13 times as massive as the sun at 200 times as massive, so that the researchers have modeled the two extremes.
As you can expect, the largest stars have spit more oxygen, and therefore produced more water, in the form of steam clouds on the mass of Jupiter, while the smallest stars produced a mass of earth water, explains Whalen.
According to the mass of the star, the researchers found that the water had taken between 3 million and 90 million years to form after the explosions of the supernovae, which means that the first water molecules formed 100 to 200 million years after the Big Bang.
Above all, however, the team has noted that this water does not simply diffuse in the cosmos. Instead, gravity caused it and other heavy elements produced by the first stars to be grouped. This in turn meant that these tufts were the reproduction ground of the second generation of stars, and perhaps the first planets. “It was a huge result,” said Whalen.
“This idea that water has formed even before the galaxies reverses essentially decades of reflection when life could have emerged in the universe,” explains Whalen. Team member Latif muhammad At the United Arab Emirates University, researchers now predict to simulate whether water vapor could survive the destruction and severe influence of the formation of the first galaxies, which means that these first molecules can still exist – potentially even on earth – today.
“The chemistry of life as we know it requires liquid water and you can only obtain on a planet or an object that has an area with an atmosphere,” said AVI counts at Harvard University. A lot of time would have passed before this first vapor condensed in liquid water, but the search for second generation stars – and their planets – using instruments like the James Webb space telescope will help us to understand this process more and if these planets could have been habitable millions of years after the Big Bang, he said.
