From the moment it landed, human life is inseparable from water. Daily life requires drinking water, fetching water for cooking, and washing the body, and the production of all walks of life in society is also closely related to the use of water resources. For this reason, water is also given the nickname - the source of life.
(Source: Veeer)
According to statistics, about three-quarters of the world's area is covered with water. Therefore, looking at the earth from space, you will feel that the planet is "watery", and the earth is therefore dubbed the "blue planet". So where does such abundant water on Earth come from?
Where does the "source of life" come from?
If there is only one answer to the question of where the water comes from, it should be - the water on Earth comes from volcanic eruptions.
Volcanic eruptions (Source: Vener)
In terms of chemical composition, water (H2O) is just a chemical composed of hydrogen and oxygen. Among them, hydrogen easily loses electrons (with reducing properties), and oxygen easily gains electrons (that is, oxidizing). As long as they can be met together, the two elements can easily combine to form water molecules.
Coincidentally, the whole universe does not lack the two elements of hydrogen and oxygen, and naturally there is no shortage of water. Now the question arises again, where did the elements in the universe come from?
The glass of water you drink starts with the "Big Bang" of the universe
When it comes to the origin and distribution of elements, we have to go back to the beginning of the universe about 13.8 billion years ago.
According to the inference of general relativity, at the birth of the universe, all the matter and energy of the universe were concentrated in a very small space, in which the temperature, pressure and density were extremely large, and this space was called a singularity.
Subsequently, the universe began to expand at an extremely fast rate, in a way that we can easily understand, as if the singularity suddenly exploded, and its space expanded indefinitely, so this process is figuratively called the "Big Bang" by scientists.
Model of the Big Bang of the universe (Image: Wikipedia)
This is where the universe began. In the earliest moments after the Big Bang, the universe was still extremely hot and extremely dense — but these were not the elements we know, but a hot, dense plasma of photons, leptons, and quark-gluons.
Soon, on a timescale of 10-4 seconds after the Big Bang, quarks and gluons had condensed into neutrons and protons (a single proton is a hydrogen nucleus), and leptons became electrons. About 3 minutes after the Big Bang, protons and neutrons synthesized into tritium (an isotope of hydrogen), helium, lithium and other elements, which made the gas of the early universe contain about 75% hydrogen, 25% helium, and a very small amount of lithium, which was the building block of all the elements that formed later.
Beginning about 400 million years after the Big Bang, these initial elements coalesced to form the earliest stars in the universe, which were all made of gas but started a new round of nucleosynthesis in the stars.
The process of nucleosynthesis is simply that lighter elements will synthesize heavier elements through nuclear fusion, which is a bit similar to the once popular 2048 mini-game: two 1s become 2, two 2 become 4, two 4 become 8...
Distribution of elements synthesized in different parts of the supergiant star (Image: Wikipedia)
The origin of the different elements in the universe (Image source: Wikipedia)
This leads to the result that the lighter the atomic number in the entire periodic table, the more such elements. Current studies of elemental abundance (simply understood as the abundance of elements) in the solar system have confirmed this.
The abundance of each element in the sun, as can be seen, is basically the larger the atomic number, the smaller the abundance (the ordinate is the logarithmic coordinate, and the difference is an order of magnitude) (Image source: Wikipedia)
So in this sense, the elemental base that forms water is abundant.
These elements may have been in such a hot state that they persisted as gaseous molecular clouds (some theories say they may be cold molecular clouds, but we don't need to dwell on these). As the temperature cools, the gaseous molecular cloud begins to form various droplets, which in turn form solid small particles.
We can imagine the process of water going from water vapor to liquid water to ice. This is true for all elements, which are plasma when hot and gradually transform into gaseous, liquid and solid states as they cool. The same is true when these molecular clouds, which mix many elements, cool down.
However, due to the mixing of elements in the molecular cloud, many complex compounds are formed, most of which are in the form of minerals, while hydrogen and oxygen are in the form of minerals. For example, the quartz we are very familiar with, its chemical composition is silica, and there is oxygen in it. Many other minerals contain hydrogen, so that hydrogen and oxygen are deposited separately in the mineral.
Of course, sometimes they exist in the form of hydroxide roots, in the form of mineral bound water, and so on. All in all, hydroxide is present in minerals in a variety of different forms.
How do planets form? It is cooled by the gaseous molecular cloud to form small mineral particles, and the small mineral particles continue to collide and grow to form stars, and stars continue to collide to form large planets. This is how our solar system was formed.
Nebula hypothesis at the origin of the solar system (Image: NASA)
As you can imagine, the birth of these planets must have been spectacular. Countless stars continue to hit the major planets, making them bigger and hotter, and at the same time, the radioactive materials carried by these little stars also converge in the interior of the planet due to melting, continuously providing heat for the planet, and finally the entire planet may become a complete magma ball.
The birth of the planetary structure
Magma is actually a high-temperature fluid, and the hydrogen and oxygen elements originally wrapped in solid stars are reactive in the magma, and some of them are synthesized into water vapor through chemical reactions and bubbles out.
Taking terrestrial planets as an example, these newly born planets are magma balls, and the cosmic background temperature is -270 ° C, so they will soon cool down, the first to cool down is the surface of the planet, which forms a primitive shell, and the deeper cooling is much slower.
In addition to temperature, under the action of gravity, dense materials sink, and small dense materials rise, so that the circle structure of the major planets we see today is formed: cooled and consolidated planetary shells, under the crust is a slow-flowing (plasticine-like form) planetary mantle, and the hottest (almost similar to the surface temperature of the sun) iron-nickel planetary nucleus is the hottest (almost similar to the surface temperature of the sun).
From left to right: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, Mars, all of which have the same shell-mantle-nuclear structure (Photo/NASA)
With this background, we can understand where water comes from and why it is ubiquitous on the major (rocky) planets.
The earliest water came from water vapor that came out of the magma when the rocky planet cooled. After the planetary shell cools to land, the water vapor condenses into rain, and then collects on the surface of the land to form surface water (large oceans are formed on Earth and Mars). The situation of Mercury and Venus is not mentioned here, but we often learn from the news that evidence of water has been found on them.
Specific to the example of Earth, we all know that there are many volcanoes on Earth, more in distant geological history, and at least 80% of the white or gray plumes of smoke emitted by volcanic eruptions are water vapor. They erupt and bring new moisture to the earth.
Erupting volcanoes continue to inject fresh water into the earth (Image: Wikipedia)
epilogue
There have always been many opinions about the origin of water on Earth. But it is undeniable that whether it is a trickle, or a cascading waterfall, a vast soup of rivers, lakes and seas, as the "heart" of the earth, on this planet, in a long time and space, it nourishes life all the time, moisturizing and silent.
Finally, the editor also wants to say to you: no matter how busy and tired you are, remember _ _ _
Author: Earth Star Gravity