"Water in our bottle is 4.5 billion years old" by Dr. Umut Yildiz

Earth is old. The sun is old. But do you know what may be even older than both? Water :)

Dr. Umut Yildiz is a deep space telecommunications engineer and astrophysicist (h-index of 32, number of citations 2625 as of Jan 2022) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

It’s not known for sure how the world became awash in it. But one theory argues that water originated on our planet from ice specks floating in a cosmic cloud before our sun was set ablaze, over 4.6 billion years ago.

The thinking goes that some of the ancient ice survived the solar system’s chaotic creation and came to Earth. To demonstrate that, researchers analyzed water molecules in oceans for indicators of their ancient past. Dr. Umut Yildiz is one of those researchers.

May 11th WEDS 9pm EST
Free-admissions event.
Registration required.