Scientists have established that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, but the timing of life's emergence remains uncertain. Recent research suggests that life could have formed much earlier than previously thought, potentially just 200 million years post-Big Bang. This new perspective emerges from a paper in Nature Astronomy, which explores how primordial stars may have generated water essential for life. The follow-up study indicates that rocky planets might form from this water-rich material relatively soon after. This research shifts the understanding of when we could have been among the first life forms in the universe.
"What our simulations showed was that you could get sites for planet formation already enriched with water levels similar to [those in] the solar system today only 200 million years after the big bang," says Daniel Whalen, an astrophysicist at the University of Portsmouth in England and lead author of both studies.
"This line of thinking is what inspired a new paper, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, that looked at how much water might've been brewed up by some of the first stars and found that they could've enriched the universe with the life-sustaining molecule surprisingly early."
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