A new study by the California Institute of Technology - Caltech, about the comet Hale Bop that passed by us in the summer of 1997, and its conclusion is that, despite the accepted opinion of many planetary scientists, until now, comets have not brought to Earth the amount of water that covers it.
A new study by the California Institute of Technology - Caltech, about the comet Hale Bop that passed by us in the summer of 1997, and its conclusion is that, despite the accepted opinion of many planetary scientists, until now, comets have not brought to Earth the amount of water that covers it.
In the March 18 issue of the journal Nature, cosmochemist Geoff Blake and his colleagues published a study in which they examined the observed amount of "heavy water" containing heavy isotopes of hydrogen called deuterium.
If Hale-Bop is a typical comet and if indeed the comets that crashed into the ancient Earth billions of years ago provided it with the amounts of water, then the oceans should contain the same percentage of deuterium as that found in the comets, but the oceans have a much smaller amount, the researchers say. "The most important question is whether the comets supplied most of the water to the Earth's oceans," says Blake, professor of space chemistry (cosmo-chemistry) and planetary sciences at Kalatech. Rabbi of comets or asteroids.” Blake used Caltech's radio telescope in Evans Valley to study organic molecules in the jets ejected from the nucleus of comet Hale-Bopp. The results show that Hale-Bop is composed of 15 to 40 percent of the primordial material that existed in the region even before the sun formed.
"Hail Bop arrived at exactly the right time for our work, says Blake. "Hail Bop is a relatively large comet, and therefore it is also the first comet that we could photograph with high definition at light lengths of a few millimeters."
Other questions that the research tried to answer, albeit in a direct way, were about the possibility that the comet, in addition to water, also brought to Earth the organic substances that contained the source of life. But the research did not solve the issue, but neither did it rule it outright, say the researchers.
