Astronomers are close to unraveling the billion-year-old mystery, scientists remain baffled

A nearby star system is helping astronomers unravel the mystery of how water appeared in our solar system billions of years ago.

Scientists observed a new star, called V883 Orionis, located 1,300 light-years away using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter telescope array, or ALMA, in northern Chile.

The star is surrounded by a planet-forming disk of clouds of gas and dust left over from when the star was born. Eventually, material in the disk coalesces to form comets, asteroids, and planets over millions of years.

A team of researchers used ALMA to measure chemical signals in the planet's formation disk, and they detected gaseous water, or water vapor. Their discovery allowed astronomers to trace the journey of water from the star-forming gas clouds that will eventually form the planets.

Their findings, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggest that comets formed from the sun's disk may have brought water to Earth. This means that the water on Earth could be older than our sun, which is 4.6 billion years old.

"We can now trace the origins of water in our Solar System back to before the formation of the Sun," lead study author John J. Tobin, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, said in a statement.

Typically, water molecules consist of one oxygen atom combined with two hydrogen atoms.