Water from asteroids and comets has the wrong isotopic fingerprint
-types. The grains had been brought back byGrains of this sort formed at the same time as Earth, and then spent the intervening billions of years orbiting the sun, occasionally gathering into tiny rocks or falling onto the surfaces of asteroids, such as, to create a fine-grained regolith. Most, though, have remained free-floating. Indeed, they are collectively visible at sunrise and sunset, in clear, dark skies, as a faint glow known as the Zodiacal light.
Using a technique called atom-probe tomography, Dr Daly was able to examine the composition of the grains in his possession one atom at a time. He found, as he describes in this week’s, that they contained a significant amount of water just below their surfaces. That surprised him. What was intriguing, though, was his discovery’s lack of deuterium.
Dr Daly reckons this water’s existence can be explained by weathering of the space dust over billions of years by the solar wind, a stream of charged particles—mostly protons—that flows out into space from the sun. When they hit a particle of space dust, these protons penetrate a few nanometres below the surface and change its chemical composition.
This finding, moreover, also hints that water could accumulate anywhere in the solar system which the solar wind can reach—the surface of the Moon, for example, as well as asteroids. That is good news for space explorers. In such places, the weathered dust could be a source of water for astronauts.
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