{"id":207769,"date":"2025-03-04T03:33:02","date_gmt":"2025-03-04T09:33:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/water-might-be-older-than-we-first-thought-forming-a-key-constituent-of-the-first-galaxies"},"modified":"2025-03-04T03:33:02","modified_gmt":"2025-03-04T09:33:02","slug":"water-might-be-older-than-we-first-thought-forming-a-key-constituent-of-the-first-galaxies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/water-might-be-older-than-we-first-thought-forming-a-key-constituent-of-the-first-galaxies","title":{"rendered":"Water might be older than we first thought, forming a key constituent of the first galaxies"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Water may have first formed 100\u2013200 million years after the Big Bang, according to a modeling paper published<\/a> in Nature Astronomy<\/i>. The authors suggest that the formation of water may have occurred in the universe earlier than previously thought and may have been a key constituent of the first galaxies.<\/p>\n

Water is crucial for life as we know it, and its components\u2014hydrogen and oxygen\u2014are known to have formed in different ways. Lighter chemical elements such as hydrogen, helium and lithium<\/a> were forged in the Big Bang, but heavier elements, such as oxygen, are the result of nuclear reactions within stars<\/a> or supernova explosions. As such, it is unclear when water began to form in the universe.<\/p>\n

Researcher Daniel Whalen and colleagues utilized computer models of two supernovae\u2014the first for a star 13 times the mass of the sun<\/a> and the second for a star 200 times the mass of the sun\u2014to analyze the products of these explosions. They found that 0.051 and 55 solar masses<\/a> (where one solar mass is the mass of our sun) of oxygen were created in the first and second simulation<\/a>, respectively, due to the very high temperatures and densities reached.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Water may have first formed 100\u2013200 million years after the Big Bang, according to a modeling paper published in Nature Astronomy. The authors suggest that the formation of water may have occurred in the universe earlier than previously thought and may have been a key constituent of the first galaxies. Water is crucial for life [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1523,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-207769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-computing","category-cosmology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207769\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}