[ExI] Much of Earth's Water Is Older Than the Sun

[BillK]

By Mike Wall, Senior Writer   |   September 25, 2014
<http://www.space.com/27256-earth-water-older-than-sun.html>

Much of the water on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system likely
predates the birth of the sun, a new study reports.

The finding suggests that water is commonly incorporated into newly
forming planets throughout the Milky Way galaxy and beyond,
researchers said -- good news for anyone hoping that Earth isn't the
only world to host life.

"The implications of our study are that interstellar water-ice
remarkably survived the incredibly violent process of stellar birth to
then be incorporated into planetary bodies," study lead author Ilse
Cleeves, an astronomy Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan,
told Space.com via email.
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This is good news for thinking that life is abundant throughout the universe.
Life will still be restricted to 'habitable' zones of course, and
there is still the problem of exactly how likely the jump from
prokaryotes to multicellular life is.


BillK