Sentences with phrase «oxygen on the comet»

It should be more variable if this chemical reaction were generating oxygen on the comet, she says.

Not exact matches

First, planetary scientists suspect that cyanide was abundant on early Earth, deposited here by comets or created in the atmosphere by ultraviolet light or by lightning (once the atmosphere became oxygen rich, 2.5 billion years ago, the process would have stopped).

Alice also documented a surprising lack of exposed water ice on the comet's surface and identified an extremely volatile, unexpected gas in the comet's atmosphere — molecular oxygen.

If other comets have oxygen, this glimpse into the early solar system's chemistry could help us piece together a record of conditions on early Earth, too.

This illustration aims to explain how high - speed water molecules (left) interact with rust and sand on the surface of a comet to form a plume (right) that contains molecular oxygen.

«We have shown experimentally that it is possible to form molecular oxygen dynamically on the surface of materials similar to those found on the comet,» says postdoctoral scholar Yunxi Yao in the press release.