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Tag: Carnegie Institution for Science

A New Model For How Earth Acquired Its Water

April 26, 2023 / / 1 Comment

One of the best known photographs of Earth, this image was taken by the crew of the final Apollo mission as the crew made its way to the Moon.  Named the “Blue Marble,” the image highlights how much of the planet is covered by water — 71 percent of the surface.  How this came to be remains an open scientific question.
(NASA)

Theories abound on how Earth got its water.

Most widely embraced is that asteroids, and maybe comets, crashed into our planet and released the water they held — in the form of ice or hydrated minerals in their crystal structures — and over time water became our oceans.  The inflow was especially intense during what is called “the Late Heavy Bombardment,” some 4 billion years ago.

The isotopic composition of our water is comparable to water in asteroids in the outer asteroid belt, and so it makes sense that they could have delivered the water to Earth,

But there is also the view Earth formed with the components of water inside the planet and the H₂O was formed and came to the surface over time.  Several hydrous minerals in our mantle store the necessary elements to create water and in this theory the pressure from hot magma rising up and cooler magma sinking down crushes this hydrous material and wrings them like a sponge.  Water would then find its way to the surface through volcanoes and underwater vents.

Now a new model has been proposed and it has a novel interest because it originates in the discovery of thousands of exoplanets in the past quarter century.

This new approach, described by Anat Shahar of the Carnegie Institution for Science and colleagues from UCLA in the journal Nature, says that Earth’s water could have come from the interactions between of a very early and primarily hydrogen atmosphere and the scalding ocean of magma that covered the planet.

That the planet could have had a thick hydrogen atmosphere that wasn’t quickly destroyed is a new idea and it comes from the finding that many so-called “super-Earth” exoplanets have, or had, such an atmosphere.  While super-Earths are larger and more massive than Earth, many are rocky, terrestrial planets and so share characteristics with our planet.

“Exoplanet discoveries have given us a much greater appreciation of how common it is for just-formed planets to be surrounded by atmospheres that are rich in molecular hydrogen, H2, during their first several million years of growth,” Shahar said.… Read more

A New Twist On Planet Formation

January 30, 2023 / / 1 Comment

This image of the nearby young star TW Hydrae reveals the classic rings and gaps that signify planets are being formed in this protoplanetary disk. {ESO, Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)}

Before the first exoplanets were discovered in the 1990s,  our own solar system served as the model for what solar systems looked like.  The physical and chemical dynamics that formed our system were also seen as the default model for what might have occurred in solar systems yet to be found.

As the number of exoplanets identified ballooned via the Kepler Space Telescope and others, and  it became clear that exoplanets were everywhere and orbiting most every star, the model of our own solar system became obviously flawed.  The first exoplanet identified, after all, was a “hot Jupiter” orbiting very close to its star — a planetary placement previously thought to be impossible.

With the growing number of known exoplanets and their most unusual placements, the field of planet formation — focused earlier on understanding on how the planets of our system came into being and what they were made of — expanded to take in the completely re-arranged planetary and solar system menagerie being found.

This was basic science seeking to understand these newfound worlds, but it also became part of the fast-growing field of astrobiology, the search for planets that might be habitable like our own.

In this context, planet formation became associated with the effort to learn more about the dynamics that actually make a planet habitable — the needed composition of a planet, the nature of its Sun, its placement in a solar system and how exactly it was formed.

So the logic of planet formation became the subject of myriad efforts to understand what might happen when a star is born, surrounded by a ring of gas and dust that will in time include larger and larger collections of solids that can evolve into meteors, planetesimals and if all goes a particular way, into planets.

A thin section of primitive meteorite under a microscope. The various colors suggest different minerals that comprise meteorites. The round-shaped mineral aggregates are called chondrules, which are among the oldest known materials in our solar system. (Science)

As part of this very broad effort to understand better how planets form, meteorites have been widely used to learn about what the early solar system was like. Meteorites are from asteroids that formed within the first several million years of planetary accretion.… Read more

A Telling Nobel Exoplanet Faux Pas

October 30, 2019 / / 0 Comments

This is the Doppler velocity curve displayed by the Nobel Committee to illustrate what Mayor and Queloz had accomplished in 1995. But actually, the graph shows the curve from the Lick Observatory in California that an American team had produced to confirm the initial finding. Such was the interweaving of the work of the Swiss and the American teams searching for the first exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star. (Image courtesy of Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler, San Francisco State University)

Given the complex history of the discovery and announcement in 1995 of the first exoplanet that orbits a sun-like star, it is perhaps no surprise that errors might sneak into the retelling.  Two main groups were racing to be first, and for a variety of reasons the discovery ended up being confirmed before it was formally announced.

A confusing situation prone to mistakes if all involved aren’t entirely conversant with the details.  But an error — tantamount to scientific plagiarism — by the Nobel Committee?   That is a surprise.

The faux pas occurred at the announcement on October 8 that Michel Mayor of the University of Geneva and Didier Queloz of the the University of Cambridge had won the Nobel for physics to honor their work in detecting that first exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star.

As Nobel Committee member Ulf Danielsson described the achievement, a powerpoint display of important moments and scientific findings in their quest was displayed on a screen behind him.

When the ultimate image was on deck to be shown  — an image that presented the Doppler velocity curve that was described as the key to the discovery — the speaker appeared to hesitate after looking down to see what was coming next.

If he did hesitate, it was perhaps because to those in the know, the curve did not come from Mayor and Queloz.

Rather, it was the work of a team led by Geoffrey Marcy and Paul Butler — the San Francisco State University group that confirmed the existence of the hot Jupiter exoplanet 51 Pegasi b several days after the discovery was made public (to some considerable controversy) at a stellar systems conference in Florence.  So at a most significant juncture of the Nobel introduction of the great work of Mayor and Queloz, hard-won data by a different team was presented as part of the duo’s achievement.

This is both awkward and embarrassing, but it also indirectly points to one of the realities that the Nobel Committee is forced, by the will of Alfred Nobel, to ignore:  That science is seldom the work now of but two or three people.… Read more

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