Space Dust Carries Water and Organic Carbon

Could Space Dust have Delivered Life’s Ingredients to Earth?

For the first time, scientists have detected water molecules on the surface of interplanetary dust particles. The water forms in tiny bubbles when solar wind irradiates and damages the dust grains floating through space.

Previous research had shown that space dust also contains organic carbon-another key ingredient for life. Taken together, these findings raise the intriguing possibility that dust trickling down from space could have seeded life’s building blocks on our own planet-and potentially elsewhere.

Dust in the (Solar) Wind

For the past 40 years, researchers have debated whether solar wind could actually produce water. When astronauts brought rocks and soil back from the Moon, scientists had noticed that solar wind irradiation creates pockets of damage on the outer layers of space objects that lack a protective atmosphere.

They quickly realized that water could potentially be created by this process. Dust grains come from the breakdown of comets, asteroids, and leftover debris from the birth of the solar system. They contain a lot of silicate, a mineral made of silicon and oxygen.

Solar wind mainly blasts clouds of hydrogen ions into space. When the wind hits cosmic debris, the ensuing damage loosens the oxygen atoms, which are then free to react with the solar wind’s hydrogen, potentially resulting in the formation of tiny pockets of water.

But the amount of water was too small to be detected-until now.

The research team, led by John Bradley of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, used a state-of-the-art transition electron microscope to finally detect these water pockets on cosmic dust. The samples had previously been collected by high-flying NASA aircrafts, and curated by the Astromaterial research group at the NASA Johnson Space Center.

The team confirmed their finding by simulating the process in the laboratory. The work was conducted at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and the findings were published this month is the journalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For more information, read the full article here.