{"id":228667,"date":"2026-01-05T15:03:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T15:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/228667\/"},"modified":"2026-01-05T15:03:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T15:03:10","slug":"the-likely-origins-of-earths-water-short-wave-npr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/228667\/","title":{"rendered":"The likely origins of Earth\u2019s water : Short Wave : NPR"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/p>\n

\n Planetary scientists have long thought water was brought to ancient Earth by comets or asteroids. Now, they’re debating whether it could have been made here.<\/p>\n

Samantha Cristoforetti\/NASA<\/p>\n

hide caption\n <\/p>\n

toggle caption<\/p>\n

Samantha Cristoforetti\/NASA<\/p>\n

Choose your fighter for the origin of water on Earth! Was it always here or did it come to this planet from somewhere else in space? And, either way, what does this mean for other water worlds in our galaxy?<\/p>\n

To find out, we talk with Michael Wong<\/a>, an astrobiologist and planetary scientist at Carnegie Science. He gets into scientists’ strongest candidates for the ways water could have come to our planet many, many years ago \u2013 including whether it could have been made here.<\/p>\n

Buckle up: This is a hot debate in astrobiology right now.<\/p>\n

If you enjoyed this episode, check out our Space Camp<\/a> series and\u00a0our episode on whether life started on the ocean floor<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If there is a science question you are curious about, email us your question at shortwave@npr.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org\/shortwave<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify<\/a> and Apple Podcasts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This episode was produced by Berly McCoy. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineer was Jimmy Keeley.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Planetary scientists have long thought water was brought to ancient Earth by comets or asteroids. Now, they’re debating…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":228668,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":{"0":"post-228667","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228667\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}