Jupiter and the other gas giants played a crucial role in transporting water to Earth and the other terrestrial planets.

The Roman god Jupiter has chequered past in our solar systems infancy. In other ways the giant shielded the earth by flinging asteroids away from the rocky planets, with the help of gravity. Likewise, Jupiter may have dispersed material inward, compressing hydrogen-rich asteroids and planetary embryos, or planetesimals, into densely compacted emerging terrestrial planets.

Researchers now believe that by doing so, Jupiter and other gas giants may have provided something else essential to rocky worlds: Water.

The giants could have guided water bearing debris from the outer parts of the solar system to the terrestrials. And newer studies point out that delivery of the liquid fundamental to existence, may not have been an accident. Rather, in any solar system that has a gas giant in the outer part, water-rich debris will rain down on the rocky inner planets.

When these gas giants have developed, the debris inside can be quite dangerous when thrown about. But late in their formation, they eject hydrogen-rich materials into the Earth’s crust/mantle, where they surface and react with oxygen to form water.

“During the formation of planetesimals, they moved in all directions and hit the terrestrial planets,” explained Sean Raymond of the University of Bordeaux, France, who led a study at the Icarus journal. Raymond’s simulations indicated that large planets in different sizes would impel water-rich material into the regions of the inner solar system, where terrestrial planets could maintain water in its liquid state.

This reagent is known as water and is perfectly necessary for the emergence and existence of life on Earth. Thus, when looking for further worlds, planets with such a solid surface, where this valuable liquid can possibly exist, serve as the main goal in the search for extra-world civilizations. For the past three decades scientists have been struggling to explain how water got to Earth and it all boiled down to the asteroids made of carbon.

In the early Solar System, accretion was accompanied by a high rate of impacts and intersecting orbits; as a result of this, early asteroids remained sensitive to close encounters with other planets. These planets’ gravities pulled the asteroids directly towards the rocky worlds. ‘It is a very interesting story, which is, in fact, important in understanding the process of formation of planets that can support life,’ said Conel Alexander, an astrochemist, who focuses on the study of ancient meteorites belonging to these asteroids.

Approximately 4. Around 5 billion years ago, the planets evolved from a gas and dust disc that was left over after the formation of the sun. This gas remained for millions of years, affecting the motions of the planets and the part of their solid frame. When temperatures increased, hydrogen – one of the most valuable components of the water – turned into ice in the cold regions of the Solar system, outside our planet.

It appeared as though our planet was preordained for a hopeless future and would degenerate into a barren planet. But then, what occurred?

‘A ridiculously basic concept’

Modern models of our solar system have revealed that the giant planets probably danced a serenade before assuming their positions. It is hypothesized that earlier Neptune and Uranus were located closer to the sun than they are currently. They went up and down and sideways over time while trading positions with each other at different stages. Of this kind, the Nice model is believed to have caused the Late Heavy Bombardment, a period of icy impacts that occurred 600 million years after the formation of the solar system.

The travels of Saturn and Jupiter could have been even more dangerous because they had to cross young asteroid belt on their way to the inner planetary zone and then they had to turn back and go back to the outer space. On the way, they provoked the collision of asteroids with the Earth. This has been named the Grand Tack model and was proposed with the help of Raymond in 2008.

At that time, Raymond became interested in the possibility of how Jupiter could have contributed to the distribution of water in the early solar system. However, his modeling efforts were stalled by a slight programming problem which he was unable to solve. It took almost a decade more for the researchers to get a fix when postdoctoral researcher Andre Izidoro came to the team.

Raymond pointed out, “Izidoro was able to locate a problem that had been bothering me for years within thirty minutes only. ”“I was really glad that he found it because at least we could continue on with the project. ”

New concept, which states that when a gas giant grows and eats up a lot of material, it pulls more toward it and thereby knocks off other protoplanets. The present gravity of the remnants of the nebula affects the manner in which debris moves through the solar system, steering a portion of them towards the inner solar system. Some of that material became trapped within the asteroid belt and hence formed carbon-rich asteroid with water inventory similar to that of the Earth.

According to Raymond, the two groups of carbon-rich asteroids used to exist within a belt that was between five and twenty times the distance of the Earth to the sun. “It must have taken up all of the solar system,” he tells me.

Still, Alexander, the carbon-rich asteroid researcher, is still sure that the area was smaller while the majority of the suspects formed closer beyond Jupiter’s orbit. Still, he concedes that Raymond’s idea does quite a good job of explaining how water-rich material got to Earth, saying his idea is “quite reasonable. ”

“This is the best way to get these volatiles into the terrestrial planet forming region,” the scientist claims.

The model leaves other concerns unanswered, including why so little of the early solar system’s abundance of mass remains now. “That’s a critical component that needs to be connected,” Raymond concedes.

Nonetheless, he claims that the model fills in other gaps, including why Earth’s water is more similar to the composition of asteroids in the outer belt than to those in the inner belts, which are dryer.

“It’s a ridiculously simple consequence of Jupiter and Saturn growing,” according to him.

Hunting water-rich worlds

Many scholars before Raymond proposed the hypothesis were working on the fact that the distinct spinning of the outer planets was the main reason that kept bringing water in the inner solar system and stopped the planet, Earth from becoming a desert. This hypothesis thus implies that anything heavier occurring on other worlds would have been disastrous since the gaseous giants would not have shifted from their position no matter the existing circumstances.

But according to the new concept, in cases of formation of any G-type planet, moist material will be propelled inward. Raymond however realized that even the gaseous bodies like the Jupiter size were efficient enough in causing growth all the other planetary bodies. This is very good for all those hunting for water-rich planets outside our solar system, as everyone is interested in water planets.

Referring to the solar system, the model indicates that ices from the outer part of the solar system would of have rained down on the Earth in three doses. Single events are responsible for the first wave while the second wave was caused by the growth of Jupiter then formation of Saturn. The third wave would have occurred when Uranus and Neptune were moving inward before stopping due to the gravitational pull of the other two planets, effectively moving to the last place in the solar system.

The Mauna Kea Observatories include astronomers who support this new perception of the solar system development, such as David O’Brien, a researcher at Planetary Science Institute particularly interested in planet formation and early solar system evolution. He said, ”I believe the most intriguing part is that, it suggests that in all the exo-solar systems with both giants and terrestrials, the giants would be pumped to deliver water, along with the terrestrials, opening up a wide range of possibilities for exploration of habitable worlds. ”

However, currently, there are not many other networks of this type to compare it with. More than 50% of currently known exoplanets have been identified through the Kepler space observatory, though O’Brien explains that it is more effective in detecting relatively compact orbits than Earth, and faces difficulty when it comes to detecting gaseous giants situated far away from stars in the system. In particular, small rocky planets are not easily discernable from larger gaseous ones since their size is relatively smaller. This does not mean they do not exist; at times we have not observed their existence or have not had the opportunity to observe it yet.

However, if such systems exist, Raymond’s study predicts that the rocky worlds should be rich in what we call the liquid of life. “If there’s terrestrial planets and giant planets, those giant planets probably gave the terrestrial planet some water,” O’Brien points out.

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