sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: From making life as we know it possible to lubricating the geological machinery of plate tectonics, water can have a huge impact on a planet’s behavior. But how do planets get their water? For example, a young world could be bombarded by icy comets and waterlogged asteroids, or it could form so far from its host star that water could precipitate as ice. However, certain exoplanets pose a mystery to astronomers: alien worlds that orbit closely around their blazing home stars and yet somehow appear to contain significant amounts of water.
A new series of laboratory experiments, published today in Naturehas revealed a deceptively simple solution to this riddle: These planets make their own water. Using diamond anvils and pulsed lasers, researchers have managed to recreate the intense temperatures and pressures at the boundary between these planets’ hydrogen atmospheres and the molten rock cores. Water emerged as the minerals boiled in the hydrogen soup. Because this kind of geological cauldron could theoretically boil and bubble for billions of years, the mechanism could give even hellishly hot planets bodies of water — implying that ocean worlds, and the potentially habitable ones, may be more common than scientists already thought. “They can basically be their own water engines,” says Quentin Williams, an experimental geochemist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the new work.
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