Publication Date:
2014-09-27
Description:
Identifying the source of Earth's water is central to understanding the origins of life-fostering environments and to assessing the prevalence of such environments in space. Water throughout the solar system exhibits deuterium-to-hydrogen enrichments, a fossil relic of low-temperature, ion-derived chemistry within either (i) the parent molecular cloud or (ii) the solar nebula protoplanetary disk. Using a comprehensive treatment of disk ionization, we find that ion-driven deuterium pathways are inefficient, which curtails the disk's deuterated water formation and its viability as the sole source for the solar system's water. This finding implies that, if the solar system's formation was typical, abundant interstellar ices are available to all nascent planetary systems.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Cleeves, L Ilsedore -- Bergin, Edwin A -- Alexander, Conel M O'D -- Du, Fujun -- Graninger, Dawn -- Oberg, Karin I -- Harries, Tim J -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2014 Sep 26;345(6204):1590-3. doi: 10.1126/science.1258055.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Astronomy, University of Michigan, 311 West Hall, 1085 South University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. cleeves@umich.edu. ; Department of Astronomy, University of Michigan, 311 West Hall, 1085 South University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. ; Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC 20015, USA. ; Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. ; Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Exeter, Stocker Road, Exeter EX4 4QL, UK.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25258075" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Deuterium/chemistry
;
Earth (Planet)
;
*Ice
;
Origin of Life
;
*Solar System
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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