Latest study proves that comets were the reason behind Earth being a habitable planet

Latest study proves that comets were the reason behind Earth being a habitable planet

If scientific research is anything to go by, our planet earth should never have been the cosmic garden it is. In a solar system of planets and moons that are mostly rock and gaseous, earth is probably the only planet that is not either bitterly cold or scorchingly
hot.

Furthermore, there is no other planet in the universe that is dripping wet which is definitely a good thing for us earthlings as we would never be able to survive had earth been just like any other planet in the galaxy.

However, our planet was infact as dull, boring, hot, cold and dustier eons ago. Our two neighbours Mercury and Venus are reminders of a time when our planet was as hot as the two. However, one wonders how earth’s temperature became so habitable?

A popular theory for this phenomenon has long since been the comets. These little rogue bodies or loose cannons as some scientists refer them to are swarming the solar system. In a layman’s term, these comets are simple dirty snowballs made of gas, rock
and ‘iced water’ that happened to experience a few crash landings on earth thus becoming the major reason of so much water on the planet.

However, many scientists still argue with this theory. Though all comets hitting Earth were packed with iced water but the type of water on those comets was of heavy water in which the normal H2O water was mixed with an isotope called deuterium which has
one proton and one neutron while the hydrogen found in edible water has no neutron.

A recent research journal published in Nature argues that the scientist might have got it all wrong and suggests that the scientists might have been looking for the wrong comets to validate their theory.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have co-authored the paper which is solely based on the observations conducted on the Herschel Space Observatory. In 1986, a comet named the Hartley 2 was discovered and after analysing the chemical constituents
of the corona of the comet, the it was discovered that the concentration of heavy water was only about half of what was observed in the previous comets.

Professor Dariusz Lis of Caltech is the co-author of the paper and believes that the comets were a major factor behind the amount of water on earth. Though the research is still far from a finished product, but scientists are now having a feeling that they
are nearly there in terms of deducing how early earth had so much water.

Today, getting hit by comets on a regular basis could spell curtains for all forms on life on earth but some billions of years ago, the same phenomenon could have started it all for all the life forms on earth.

Short URL: https://www.newspakistan.pk/?p=3086

Posted by Taimoor Tariq on Nov 10 2011. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry