Scientists discover the origin of water and it's billions of years earlier than previously thought

New research has revealed a key ingredient to life might have come into existence in the universe billions of years before we initially thought.

Water might make up 70 percent of our home planet's surface, but scientists have long considered its origins a gray area and have been left puzzled when Earth's water actually first appeared.

However, that's until UK scientists from the University of Portsmouth started tracing its origins.

In a major breakthrough, the team wrote in Nature Astronomy that water was most likely around during a period called the 'cosmic dawn', between 50 million and one billion years after the Big Bang.

This is far earlier than scientists previously thought was possible.

The researchers note water could've been present in the early universe (Getty Images)

In fact, they argue water could have been a 'key constituent of the first galaxies'.

The team claim water appeared in the cosmos in the debris of supernova explosions, some 100 to 200 million years after the Big Bang - billions of years earlier than what scientists previously thought.

The researchers used computer simulations to map out how water most likely formed when the very first stars in the universe died and fell into supernovae.

They explained this is because oxygen was produced by the blasts which then cooled and joined with hydrogen, forming H20 in the cluster of material which went on to form the first planets, though the two elements didn't come into existence at the same time.

The cosmic event created hydrogen and helium (Getty Images)

In paper, Dr Daniel Whalen and his co-authors said: "Besides revealing that a primary ingredient for life was already in place in the Universe 100–200 Myr after the Big Bang, our simulations show that water was probably a key constituent of the first galaxies."

Hydrogen came along with helium and lithium within just a few minutes of the Big Bang, sparked by super-heated particles that cooled and clumped into atoms.

But oxygen had a bit of a harder time, as its atoms are so large and require other heavier elements.

Fortunately for us Earthlings, 100 million years after the cosmic event, about 13.7 billion years ago, hydrogen and helium came under the force of gravity where they grew denser, ignited nuclear fusion reactions and not only brought the first light to the cosmos, but triggered enormous supernovae and formed larger molecules, including oxygen.

Mimicking the behavior of the supernovae, the scientists say their study shows how water could have arrived on habitable planets, such as our own in the Milky Way, and could have existed before the universe's first galaxies.

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