The first water may have formed surprisingly soon after the big burst

The first water molecules may have formed only 100 million to 200 million years after the big burst – before even the first galaxies – began a process that brought to life on Earth … and maybe elsewhere.

Shortly after the big burst, most of the things in the universe were hydrogen and helium, and only the amount of other lighter elements, such as lithium. The heavier elements like oxygen have not existed yet, which prevents water from forming.

These initial elements gathered in the first stars, which then produced heavier elements nuclear fusion including, crucial, oxygen. When these stars arrived for the rest of their life, they exploded like Supernovae, releasing these heavier elements and allowing oxygen to mix and combine with existing hydrogen to create h₂O – water.

Previous research He showed that even the relatively low amounts of oxygen produced in the earliest stars could make water molecules, but so far no one has simulated exactly what happens if the primordial star went to Supernovo and how the elements they posted would be mixed with the cosmological environment in which the star was formed, he says, says Daniel Whalen at the University of Portsmouth, UK. “To do anything less, you really 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 stars in a real context. These early stars are thought to have ranged from 13 times massive from the sun to 200 times massive, so researchers have modeled both extremes.

As you can expect, bigger stars took more oxygen and thus produced more water, in the form of a cloud of steam about the mass of Jupiter, while smaller stars produced the Earth’s water mass, Whalen says.

Depending on the mass of the star, researchers have found that the water lasted between 3 million and 90 million years after the Supernova explosions, which means that the first water molecules formed 100 to 200 million years after the big burst.

It is important, however, the team found that this water was not simply diffuse throughout the cosmos. Instead, gravity also caused other heavy elements that produced the first stars to collect. This in turn meant that these accumulation of farms were for the second generation of stars and perhaps the first planet. “That was a huge result,” Whalen says.

“This idea that the water has been formed even before the galaxies have fundamentally overturned for decades of thinking about when life could appear for the first time in space,” Whalen says. A member of the team Muhammad Latif At the University of the United Arab Emirates, researchers are now planning to simulate whether water vapor can survive the destruction and sharp radiation of the first galaxy formation, which means that those wound molecules can still exist – potentially even on Earth today.

“The chemistry of life as we know it requires running water and that you can only get on the planet or an object that has a surface with the atmosphere,” he says Avi counts at Harvard University. A lot of time would have passed before that first couple would be summed up in running water, but looking for the stars of the second generation-and their planets-using instruments like the James WebB space telescope, it will help us to understand this process more and whether these planets were inhabited millions of years after the big burst, he says.