The water that makes up the oceans acted as a key ingredient for the development of life on Earth. However, scientists still do not know where the water here on Earth came from in the first place.
One leading idea is that space rocks such as comets and asteroids delivered water to the Earth through impacts. As a planetary scientist, I’m curious about the kinds of space objects that could have led to the formation of the oceans. For the past few years, I’ve been studying a type of object that I called a dark comet — which could be just the culprit. In a new study my colleagues and I published in December 2024, we discovered two classes of these elusive dark comets.
