Identifying the source of Earth's water is central to understanding the origins of life-fostering environments and to assessing the prevalence of such environments in space. Water throughout the solar system exhibits deuterium-to-hydrogen enrichments, a fossil relic of low-temperature, ion-derived chemistry within either (i) the parent molecular cloud or (ii) the solar nebula protoplanetary disk. Utilizing a comprehensive treatment of disk ionization, we find that ion-driven deuterium pathways are inefficient, curtailing the disk's deuterated water formation and its viability as the sole source for the solar system's water. This finding implies that if the solar system's formation was typical, abundant interstellar ices are available to all nascent planetary systems.
@article{arxiv.1409.7398,
title = {The ancient heritage of water ice in the solar system},
author = {L. Ilsedore Cleeves and Edwin A. Bergin and Conel M. O'D. Alexander and Fujun Du and Dawn Graninger and Karin I. Öberg and Tim J. Harries},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.7398},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
33 pages, 7 figures including main text and supplementary materials. Published in Science