[meteorite-list] Space Observatory Provides Clues To Creation Of Earth's Oceans (Herschel/Comet Hartley 2)

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2011 11:18:05 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201110051818.p95II5OA008654_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

Oct. 5, 2011

Dwayne Brown
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726
dwayne.c.brown at nasa.gov

Whitney Clavin
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-4673
whitney.clavin at jpl.nasa.gov
RELEASE: 11-338

SPACE OBSERVATORY PROVIDES CLUES TO CREATION OF EARTH'S OCEANS

WASHINGTON -- Astronomers have found a new cosmic source for the same
kind of water that appeared on Earth billions of years ago and
created the oceans. The findings may help explain how Earth's surface
ended up covered in water.

New measurements from the Herschel Space Observatory show that comet
Hartley 2, which comes from the distant Kuiper Belt, contains water
with the same chemical signature as Earth's oceans. This remote
region of the solar system, some 30 to 50 times as far away as the
distance between Earth and the sun, is home to icy, rocky bodies
including Pluto, other dwarf planets and innumerable comets.

"Our results with Herschel suggest that comets could have played a
major role in bringing vast amounts of water to an early Earth," said
Dariusz Lis, senior research associate in physics at the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena and co-author of a new paper in
the journal Nature, published online Oct. 5. "This finding
substantially expands the reservoir of Earth ocean-like water in the
solar system to now include icy bodies originating in the Kuiper
Belt."

Scientists theorize Earth started out hot and dry, so that water
critical for life must have been delivered millions of years later by
asteroid and comet impacts. Until now, none of the comets previously
studied contained water like Earth's. However, Herschel's
observations of Hartley 2, the first in-depth look at water in a
comet from the Kuiper Belt, paint a different picture.

Herschel peered into the comet's coma, or thin, gaseous atmosphere.
The coma develops as frozen materials inside a comet vaporize while
on approach to the sun. This glowing envelope surrounds the comet's
"icy dirtball"-like core and streams behind the object in a
characteristic tail.

Herschel detected the signature of vaporized water in this coma and,
to the surprise of the scientists, Hartley 2 possessed half as much
"heavy water" as other comets analyzed to date. In heavy water, one
of the two normal hydrogen atoms has been replaced by the heavy
hydrogen isotope known as deuterium. The ratio between heavy water
and light, or regular, water in Hartley 2 is the same as the water on
Earth's surface. The amount of heavy water in a comet is related to
the environment where the comet formed.

By tracking the path of Hartley 2 as it swoops into Earth's
neighborhood in the inner solar system every six and a half years,
astronomers know that it comes from the Kuiper Belt. The five comets
besides Hartley 2 whose heavy-water-to-regular-water ratios have been
obtained all come from an even more distant region in the solar
system called the Oort Cloud. This swarm of bodies, 10,000 times
farther afield than the Kuiper Belt, is the wellspring for most
documented comets.

Given the higher ratios of heavy water seen in Oort Cloud comets
compared to Earth's oceans, astronomers had concluded that the
contribution by comets to Earth's total water volume stood at
approximately 10 percent. Asteroids, which are found mostly in a band
between Mars and Jupiter but occasionally stray into Earth's
vicinity, looked like the major depositors. The new results, however,
point to Kuiper Belt comets having performed a previously
underappreciated service in bearing water to Earth.

How these objects ever came to possess the tell-tale oceanic water is
puzzling. Astronomers had expected Kuiper Belt comets to have even
more heavy water than Oort Cloud comets because the latter are
thought to have formed closer to the sun than those in the Kuiper
Belt. Therefore, Oort Cloud bodies should have had less frozen heavy
water locked in them prior to their ejection to the fringes as the
solar system evolved.

"Our study indicates that our understanding of the distribution of the
lightest elements and their isotopes, as well as the dynamics of the
early solar system, is incomplete," said co-author Geoffrey Blake,
professor of planetary science and chemistry at Caltech. "In the
early solar system, comets and asteroids must have been moving all
over the place, and it appears that some of them crash-landed on our
planet and made our oceans."

Herschel is a European Space Agency cornerstone mission, with science
instruments provided by consortia of European institutes. NASA's
Herschel Project Office is based at the agency's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which contributed mission-enabling
technology for two of Herschel's three science instruments. The NASA
Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis
Center at Caltech in Pasadena, supports the U.S. astronomical
community.

For NASA's Herschel website, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/herschel

For ESA's Herschel website, visit:

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Herschel/index.html
        
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Received on Wed 05 Oct 2011 02:18:05 PM PDT