Cosmology: the high probability of early water (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, March 03, 2025, 19:35 (3 days ago) @ David Turell

Water is vital for life:

https://www.sciencealert.com/water-may-have-come-into-existence-far-earlier-than-we-eve...

"Life's most vital elixir may have formed within 200 million years of the Big Bang, new research suggests. Conditions for producing water were thought to be lacking this early on because heavier elements like oxygen were scarce, but new simulations indicate the baby Universe could still have been wet.

"Cosmologist Daniel Whalen from Portsmouth University in the UK and colleagues virtually recreated the explosions of two stars using early Universe parameters, and found the means to make water were already present as early as 100 million years after the Universe exploded into existence.

"... gases of hydrogen, helium, and lithium from the Big Bang coalescing into the first stars, releasing heavier elements like oxygen into the Universe during their explosive deaths:

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"Today, highly metallic stars have an abundance of oxygen in their cores, but the first stars were made almost entirely out of hydrogen and helium. These early stars likely burnt hot and fast, making it hard for astronomers to catch traces of them, but new data from JWST may have just revealed the first direct evidence of their existence.

***

"Within the first second of the virtual supernovae, the temperatures and pressures were high enough to fuse more of the former star gases into oxygen. In the aftermath of this cataclysm, the expelled energized gases, stretching out as far as 1,630 light-years, began to cool.

"The rapid cooling happened faster than the material coalesced, causing ionized hydrogen molecules to pair up, forming water's other key ingredient: molecular hydrogen (H2).

"As these particles jostled about, particularly in the denser regions of the supernova haloes, oxygen collided with enough hydrogen to make the Universe wet."

Comment: if life was a purpose of the Big Bang, the early appearance of water was a very necessary component to design.