Hi there! Can you imagine that our water does not originally come from the Earth, but from the outer Solar System? The study I present you today explains us how it came to us. This is Origin of water in the inner Solar System: Planetesimals scattered inward during Jupiter and Saturn’s rapid gas accretion by Sean Raymond and Andre Izidoro, which has recently been published in Icarus.

From the planetary nebula to the Solar System

There are several competing scenarios, which describe a possible path followed by the Solar System from its early state to its current one. But all agree that there was originally a protoplanetary disk, orbiting our Sun. It was constituted of small particles and gas. Some of the small particles accreted to form the giant planets, first as a massive core, then in accreting some gas around. The proto-Jupiter cleared a ring-shaped gap around its orbit in the disk, Saturn formed as well, the planets migrated, in interacting with the gas. How fast did they migrate? Inward? Outward? Both? Scenarios diverge. Anyway, the gas was eventually ejected, and the protoplanetary disk was essentially cleared, except when it is not. There remains the telluric planets, the giant planets, and the asteroids, many of them constituting the Main Belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
If you want to elaborate a fully consistent scenario of formation / evolution of the Solar System, you should match the observations as much as possible. This means matching the orbits of the existing objects, but not only. If you can match their chemistry as well, that is better.

No water below this line!

The origin of water is a mystery. You know that we have water on Earth. It seems that this water comes from the so-called C-type asteroids. These are carbonaceous asteroids, which contain a significant proportion of water, usually between 5 and 20%. This is somehow the same water as on Earth. In particular, it is consistent with the ratios D/H and ¹⁵N/¹⁴N present in our water. D is the deuterium, it is an isotope of hydrogen (H), while ¹⁵N and ¹⁴N are two isotopes of nitrogen (N).

These asteroids are mostly present close to the outer boundary of the Main Belt, i.e. around 3.5 AU. An important parameter of a planetary system is the snow line: below a given radius, the water cannot condensate into ice. That makes sense: the central star (in our case, the Sun) is pretty hot (usually more than pretty, actually…), and ice cannot survive in a hot environment. So, you have to take some distance. And the snow line of the Solar System is currently lose to 3.5 AU, where we can find these C-type asteroids. Very well, there is no problem…

But there is one: the location of the snow line changes during the formation of the Solar System, since it depends on the dynamical structure of the disk, i.e. eccentricity of the particles constituting it, turbulence in the gas, etc. in addition to the evolution of the central star, of course. To be honest with you, I have gone through some literature and I cannot tell you where the snow line was at a given date, it seems to me that this is still an open question. But the authors of this study, who are world experts of the question, say that the snow line was further than that when these C-types asteroids formed. I trust them.

And this raises an issue: the C-types asteroids, composed of at least 5% of water, have formed further than they are. This study explains us how they migrated inward, from their original location to their present one.

Planet encounter and gas drag populate the Asteroid Belt

The authors ran intensive numerical simulations, in which the asteroids are massless particles, but with a given radius. This seems weird, but this just means that the authors neglected the gravitational action of the asteroids on the giant planets. The reason why they gave them a size in that it influences the way the gas drag (remember: the early Solar System was full of gas) affects their orbits. This size actually proved to be a key parameter. So, these asteroids were affected by the gas and the giant planets, but in the state they were at that time, i.e. initially Jupiter and Saturn were just slowly accreting cores, and when these cores of solid material reached a critical size, then they were coated by a pretty rapid (over a few hundreds of kyr) accretion of gas. The authors considered only Jupiter in their first simulations, then Jupiter and Saturn, and finally the four giant planets. Their different parameters were:

• the size of the asteroids (planetesimals),
• the accretion velocity of the gas around Jupiter and Saturn,
• the evolution scenario of the early Solar System. In particular, the way the giant planets migrated.

Simulating the formation of the planet actually affects the orbital evolution of the planetesimals, since the mass of the planets is increasing. The more massive the planet, the most deviated the asteroid.

And the authors succeed in putting C-type asteroids with this mechanism: when a planetesimal encounters a proto-planet (usually the proto-Jupiter), its eccentricity reaches high numbers, which threatens its orbital stability around the Sun. But the gas drag damps this eccentricity. So, these two effects compete, and when ideally balanced this results in asteroids in the Main-Belt, on low eccentric orbits. And the authors show that this works best for mid-sized asteroids, i.e. of the order of a few hundreds of km. Below, Jupiter ejects them very fast. Beyond, the gas drag is not efficient enough to damp the eccentricity. And this is consistent with the current observations, i.e. there is only one C-type asteroid larger than 1,000 km, this is the well-known Ceres.

However, the scenarios of evolution of the Solar System do not significantly affect this mechanism. So, it does not tell us how the giant planets migrated.

Once the water ice has reached the main asteroid belt, other mechanism (meteorites) carry it to the Earth, where it can survive thanks to our atmosphere.

Making the exoplanets habitable

This study proposes a mechanism of water delivery, which could be adapted to any planetary system. In particular, it tells us a way to make exoplanetary planets habitable. Probably more to come in the future.

To know more…

• The study, presented by the first author (Sean N. Raymond) on his own blog,
• The website of Sean N. Raymond,
• The IAU page of Andre Izidoro.
• And I would like to mention Pixabay, which provides free images, in particular the one of Cape Canaveral you see today. Is this shuttle going to fetch some water somewhere?

That’s it for today! Please do not forget to comment. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed, and follow me on Twitter and Facebook.