Abstract
Main Belt Comets as Clues to the Distribution of Water in the Early Solar System
Highlights
We have only one example of an inhabited world, namely Earth, with its thin veneer of water, the solvent essential to known life
Is a terrestrial planet like Earth that lies in the habitable zone and has the ingredients of habitability a common outcome of planet formation or an oddity that relied on a unique set of stochastic processes during the growth and subsequent evolution of our solar system? water originates in space, likely formed on dust grain surfaces via reactions with atoms inside cold molecular clouds (Tielens & Hagen, 1982)
These searches for often weak Main belt comets (MBCs) activity are typically limited by image sensitivity though, meaning that discovery rates of MBCs and other active asteroids should increase significantly during the upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) to be conducted by the Vera C
Summary
We have only one example of an inhabited world, namely Earth, with its thin veneer of water, the solvent essential to known life. New models and new data, including Rosetta mission results from comet 67P, show that comets chemically similar to 67P could not have delivered the majority of volatiles because their D/H isotopic signatures in water do not match that of Earth (Altwegg et al, 2015). There is another reservoir that we can sample that probes early solar system history. This approach can distinguish between competing models of solar system formation to pinpoint where terrestrial water came from and how it was delivered
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