Origin of Most of the Earth’s Surface tagged posts

Dr. Alice Stephant, an astrophysicist, is helping to solve a longstanding mystery about water on Earth: where it came from.

Scientists long thought that water, which covers 70% of the Earth, is probably rare or non-existent on other planets. The assumption was that water on Earth resulted from a unique series of galactic events billions of years ago.

Stephant, who works at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy’s capital Rome, is challenging these longstanding assumptions.

She has produced research that suggests the chemical components of water—hydrogen and oxygen—could have come from the giant cloud of dust and gas that gave rise to Earth’s solar system.

If water from that cloud could go directly into forming planets, it could...