Where did Earth's water come from? Comets? Icy planetesimals? Microscopic minerals inside ancient meteorites provide a new trail of clues.
H is unstable. The three hydrogen isotopes are also called protium, deuterium, and tritium. Water contains different amounts of the three, especially protium and deuterium. Scientists express these relative amounts as a ratio. The D/H ratio is the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen.
This image from the paper shows some of the detailed imaging in the study. It shows CAI E101.1, one of four CAIs that scientists have dated accurately. The images show the location of a sinuous xenolith in the CAI. The panel on the right shows the mineralogy of the xenolith. CAI E101.1 has experienced only modest metamorphic modification and little fluid circulation, and according to the authors, that helped preserve the xenoliths primordial D/H fingerprint. Image Credit: Aléon et al. 2022.
“All primary minerals formed by condensation from the solar gas turned out to have low hydrogen content and also to be depleted in deuterium with the endmember composition being similar to that expected for the main solar nebular gas. So most likely they trapped a little bit of solar nebular hydrogen during their formation,” Aléon said.
So now we have CAIs with minerals containing water records with two separate isotopic fingerprints. The first type matches the D/H ratio of the solar nebula, and the second type more closely resembles the D/H of Earth’s water. “So we demonstrate the existence of two nebular gases that were encountered successively by the xenolith before its capture. the solar nebular H2 gas almost devoid of deuterium and a gas enriched in H2O with Earth-like isotopic composition,” Aléon explained.
“Box 2 contains only a tiny bit of hydrogen atoms locked in molecules formed at extremely low temperatures in the cold interstellar cloud. Because of these very low temperatures, they are very rich in deuterium, much more than the Earth,” Aléon said.
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