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Old 27th September 2014, 13:34     #11
Lightspeed
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ab
It's not exactly rocket surgery though, is it? Water is mostly oxygen. Oxygen is a heavy atom produced by old massive stars, of which the sun is not one being composed almost entirely of hydrogen. Therefore the water in the solar system was here before the sun formed.
Perhaps I misread the article but I thought the finding was that the water entered our solar system after the formation of the sun, rather than answering any question of whether the elements that the water is composed of was produced by our sun.

Again, having to spend a good part of my week teasing the technical elements out of documents and communications my capacity for reading comprehension can get a little burnt out, so perhaps I've gotten something backwards in reading the article. However my read suggests that some portion of water did in fact exist or was formed (the molecule rather than the elements) in the solar system at the point the sun formed.

This whole business of the formation of elements seems irrelevant. The reason this is relevant (water existing/forming in the solar system at the point of it emerging as a system vs water arriving from interstellar space at a later point) is that water existing in our solar system is likely common amongst similar systems rather than novel meaning if we were to happen to have a space ship that could accelerate through space without the need of carrying it's own accelerant we've got a good shot of coming into contact with other life in our region of space.
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