Asteroids could have delivered water to the early Earth
The space rocks’ impacts wouldn’t have boiled all of their water away, study suggests
Shooting small rocks from a high-speed cannon showed that some asteroids could have brought water to the early Earth — without all the water boiling away on impact, a new study finds.
“We can’t bring an asteroid to Earth and crash it into the Earth, bad things would happen,” says planetary geologist R. Terik Daly, who did the research while a graduate student at Brown University in Providence, R.I. “So we went into the lab and tried to re-create the event as best we can.”