Recently read that water is older than the sun.How can we determine the age of water if it’s continuously being used in the water cycle?
In: Physics
To answer your question very specifically –
Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen atoms that have bound up together in a molecule, that bit is pretty easy.
Whatever process that is responsible for *making* the atoms come together and make the water, we’ve observed something fairly simple – every now and then something screws up and the oxygen picks up an extra particle called a ~~proton~~ neutron and this new water is obviously a teeeeny bit heavier than normal water so we call it *heavy water* or “deuterium”.
Anywho, we know from science how often heavy water forms during normal water production and what causes more of it to be made, or less of it.
By extension we know that the conditions that exist in deep space, specifically *not* conditions that exist on Earth, create higher than normal amounts of deuterium.
Long story short when we look at Earth’s water there *is too much deuterium*. So where does it come from? That’s an open theory but the article you read proposed it was water that was delivered to the Earth, pre-made in deep space. So things like asteroids and meteors and rocks from deep space had water than came to our baby solar system and got pulled into the Earth when it formed. Thus, the water is *older* than the Sun because it was made in deep space and then got sucked in the Earth after the Sun was born.
EDIT – Meant Neutron. Stupid sexy subatomic particles.
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