Water may have formed shortly after the Big Bang, study suggests

The first water molecules could have formed just 100 million to 200 million years after the Big Bang – even the first galaxy kicked off the processes that led to life on Earth.

Shortly after the Big Bang, most of the problems in the universe were hydrogen and helium, with only traces of other lighter elements, such as lithium. Heavy elements like oxygen are not yet present, and water is impossible to form.

These early elements were combined into the first star and produced heavier elements through oxygen-containing fusion. When these stars reach the end of their lives, they explode as supernovae, releasing these heavier elements, allowing oxygen to mix and mix with existing hydrogen to combine H.₂O – Water.

Previous research It shows that even the relatively small amount of oxygen produced by the earliest stars could create water molecules, but they say up until now they have not simulated exactly what happens when a protostar becomes a supernova, and how the elements it released blended with the cosmic environment in which the stars were formed. Daniel Warren At the University of Portsmouth, UK. “To do anything less, you just don't know what's going on,” he says.

To investigate this, Whalen and his team used computer models to simulate the birth and death of the first star in a realistic context. These early stars are thought to range from 13 times the massive range of the Sun to 200 times the size of the Sun, so researchers modeled both extremes.

As you can imagine, the larger stars spit out more oxygen and produced more water in the form of steam clouds around the Jupiter mass, while the smaller stars produced Earth's mass, says Whaleen.

Depending on the mass of the star, researchers discovered that water took between 3 million and 90 million years after the supernova explosion. In other words, the first water molecules were formed 100-200 million years after the Big Bang.

Importantly, however, the team discovered that this water was not simply spreading throughout the universe. Instead, gravity caused it, and the other heavy elements produced by the first star were clumped together. That meant these chunks were breeding grounds for the second generation stars, and perhaps the first planet. “It was a huge result,” Whalen says.

“Even before the galaxy took place, this idea of ​​water forming essentially overturning decades of thought about the first emergence of life in the universe,” says Whalen. Team Members Muhammadratif At UAE University, researchers now say they will simulate whether water vapor can survive the destruction of the formation of the first galaxy and harsh radiation.

“We know that the chemistry of life we ​​know requires liquid water and can only be obtained in objects with surfaces in the universe or atmospheric.” avi loeb At Harvard University. It would have been a lot of time before this initial vapor condense into liquid water, but he says it could have helped them to find second-generation stars and their planets using instruments like the James Webbspace Telescope to help them understand this process more, and perhaps these planets could have been habitable millions of years after the Big Bang.