Up to about half of the water on our planet is older than the sun, according to a paper published on Thursday in the journal Science. 
 
 While you next take a sip, ponder this, too: the fact that Earth’s water is so old bodes well for our hunt for wet environments — and, for life — elsewhere in the universe. 
 
 Life on Earth owes everything to the presence of liquid water here, but, even so, scientists don’t have definitive answers for how or when the water got here — or, for that matter, when the water itself was formed. 
 
 
 
 The new research seeks to answer that last question: Was our water made before the sun existed, brewed in the same cloud of dust from which the sun would form? Or did water come later, forming as the Earth also formed? 
 
 As the Washington Post explains, during the sun’s birth a band of unused space dust gathered like skirt hems around it. Such material, called the protoplanetary disk, would go on to form the solar system’s planets. 
 
 Scientists know that water accompanied the sun’s birth but wondered if it might have been destroyed in the process of the sun’s formation, leaving Earth to go it alone in stirring up its own water. 
 
 To find out if the water from that dust cloud made it to Earth, researchers measured the ratio of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen to hydrogen. The findings show that heavy hydrogen levels on Earth are higher than they would have been in the protoplanetary disk. That means that some of our water must predate the sun, when heavy hydrogen was in abundance. 
 
 So, if water can survive a star’s birthing process, and if other solar systems in the universe formed much like ours did, that means that water might be a common ingredient in the making of other planets far from our own. 
 
 “By identifying the ancient heritage of Earth’s water, we can see that the way in which our solar system was formed will not be unique, and that exoplanets will form in environments with abundant water,” said Tim Harries, a professor at the University of Exeter’s Physics and Astronomy Department, in England, and an author of the paper, in a statement. 
 
 “Consequently,” he said, “it raises the possibility that some exoplanets could house the right conditions, and water resources, for life to evolve.” 
 
 Last spring, scientists announced that there could be up to 11 billion exoplanets — planets outside or solar system — that are at just the right distance from their stars to have liquid water, and, perhaps, life as well. ||||| Canadian Geoscientists have uncovered water that dates back a whopping two billion years. It’s the oldest water ever discovered on Earth, and it could broaden our understanding of how life emerged on our planet—and possibly elsewhere. 
 
 
 
 “It won’t kill you if you drank it, but it would taste absolutely disgusting.” 
 
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 The University of Toronto researchers found the primordial water at a depth of 1.5 miles miles (2.4 km) in Kidd Creek Mine, which is located in Timmins, Ontario. The team, co-led by geoscientist Oliver Warr, explained their findings at an American Geophysical Union meeting held earlier this week in San Francisco. These findings are set to appear in a future edition of the journal Nature. 
 
 Three years ago, these same researchers discovered 1.5 billion-year-old water in the same active copper, zinc, and silver mine, but at a shallower depth. They decided to look deeper, finding pools of water that date back to a time when the Earth was just 2.5 billion years old. Incredibly, this ancient water was freely flowing, and not embedded within rock formations as some geoscientists had assumed. 
 
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 “When people think about this water they assume it must be some tiny amount of water trapped within the rock,” said U of T geochemist Barbara Sherwood Lollar in a conversation with the BBC. “But in fact it’s very much bubbling right up out at you. These things are flowing at rates of litres per minute—the volume of the water is much larger than anyone anticipated.” 
 
 
 
 A chemical analysis of the water revealed traces of helium, argon, neon, krypton, and xenon. These gases accumulate in the water over time, allowing the researchers to calculate its age. The water also contains trace metals and salt (about eight times the amount found in seawater). “It won’t kill you if you drank it, but it would taste absolutely disgusting,” noted Warr in a CBC article. 
 
 The researchers describe the water as an “interconnected fluid system” deep in the Canadian Shield that’s billions of years old and capable of supporting life. “We are just slowly beginning to understand that in fact we are looking at a whole new hydrosphere on the planet,” explained Lollar to the National Post. And indeed, several regions on Earth contain ancient isolated water in geological formations below the surface. 
 
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 Further analysis of this old timey H2O could reveal new insights into the state of the Earth’s atmosphere two billion years ago. Importantly, this water could also tell us something about how life might have once existed at these extreme depths, and the kind of life we might expect to find on alien planets. 
 
 
 
 [CBC, BBC, National Post]
– If you live and die by food and beverage expiration dates, you might not want to know how old some of our drinking water is. A study finds that 30% to 50% of the water found in our taps and oceans contains molecules created more than 4.5 billion years ago—making them older than our solar system and the sun, the Los Angeles Times reports. The findings from the study, published in Science, indicate that certain water molecules contain a deuterium atom instead of a hydrogen atom (making what's called "heavy water"), which could only be created under very cold, energy-replete conditions—specific conditions that didn't exist before the Earth, sun, and solar system were formed. Earth was actually "born dry," in an extremely hot environment, according to the Times. Scientists believe we eventually received water via comets or asteroids that crashed down on Earth's surface. Figuring out where the water in the comets and asteroids came from, however, is another story, though researchers think they've narrowed it down to two possibilities: that the heavy deuterium water was dispersed among bodies in the solar system during the "violent" process of our sun's birth, or that the heavy water originated from ice found in the gas cloud from which our sun and solar system were born. Either way, researchers say this could indicate that young planets all around the universe contain water: According to scientists, there are up to 11 billion planets outside our own system that could house liquid water and, possibly, life, notes Time. (The amount of water found on Mars surprised scientists around the world.)