The universe didn’t start with water. No cosmic waterfalls, no space puddles—just an endless expanse of hydrogen, helium, and a lonely dash of lithium. But then came the first stars, massive and short-lived, detonating in supernova tantrums. And in their fiery deaths, they may have done something remarkable: forged the first drops of water.
We used to think water showed up fashionably late to the cosmic party, maybe around 780 million years after the Big Bang. Turns out, scientists may have underestimated the universe’s early chemistry skills. A new study, backed by ruthless computational simulations, suggests water vapor formed much earlier—possibly within 100 to 200 million years of existence itself. That’s practically infancy in cosmic terms.
Daniel Whalen, an astrophysicist at the University of Portsmouth, was understandably stunned. “The surprise was that the ingredients for life were all in place in dense cloud cores [leftover after stellar deaths] so early after the Big Bang,” he says. Translation: the universe wasn’t just making stars—it was setting the stage for life before galaxies even got their act together.
But let’s be clear: this wasn’t some primeval space ocean. What we’re talking about is water vapor, produced in the wreckage of enormous stars that went supernova. Because in the beginning, stars were different. Bigger. Shorter-lived. The kind that didn’t just quietly fade away but exploded with enough force to rattle the very fabric of existence.
These supernovas spewed out vital elements: carbon, oxygen, and enough heavy metals to make a rock band jealous. And when the explosions cooled, oxygen and hydrogen—two cosmic drifters—found each other and formed water vapor. A slow process, sure, but given a few million years, the universe was already getting hydrated.
The key to this early water lies in the conditions left behind. A supernova is chaos incarnate—high temperatures, violent shock waves, and debris flung across space. Not exactly a gentle environment for fragile molecules like H₂O. That’s why early water formation was limited to the dense, cooling cores of these stellar graves.
Volker Bromm, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, puts it bluntly: “Water is a pretty fragile molecule. So the catch is, do we have conditions that can form it [very early in the universe]?” The simulations say yes. The universe, even in its wild and chaotic youth, was already layering the groundwork for life’s most essential ingredient.
Researchers modeled the deaths of two hypothetical early stars—one 13 times the mass of our Sun, the other a staggering 200 times as massive. Both ended in supernovas, scattering their elemental remains into space. As the debris cooled, the atoms finally got a chance to collide and bond, forming water in the aftermath of destruction.
But here’s where it gets interesting. While some parts of the expanding blast wave were too hot and thin for water to survive, the dense central regions of the remnants were another story. After a few million years (a blink in cosmic time), water vapor started accumulating. The dead stars had, quite literally, planted the first seeds of hydration in the universe.
It’s a poetic twist—water, the lifeblood of planets, the foundation of biology, forged in the explosive deaths of the cosmos’ first giants. Forget the idea that water trickled in slowly over eons. It seems the universe wasted no time setting the stage for something big.
Five Fast Facts
- The first stars were so massive they burned through their fuel in just a few million years—compared to our Sun’s expected 10-billion-year lifespan.
- Supernovas don’t just make water; they also create gold, silver, and even uranium, sprinkling the cosmos with bling.
- Neutron stars, the remnants of some supernova explosions, are so dense that a sugar-cube-sized piece would weigh about a billion tons on Earth.
- Oxygen, one of water’s key ingredients, makes up about 46% of Earth’s crust—but it had to be forged in ancient stars first.
- Hydrogen, the universe’s most abundant element, is so old that every hydrogen atom in your body has existed since the Big Bang.