A new study suggests that water might have formed 100-200 million years after the Big Bang, according to a modeling paper published in Nature Astronomy. Researchers used computer simulations of two supernovae explosions to analyze the products of these events.
The simulations found that oxygen was created at very high temperatures and densities, which then cooled and mixed with surrounding hydrogen, forming water. The amount of water formed varied between 0.0001 and 0.055 solar masses in different scenarios.
If water could have survived the formation of first galaxies, it may have been incorporated into planet formation billions of years ago. This discovery challenges our understanding of when water began to form in the universe, and its implications are significant for the origins of life as we know it.
Source: https://phys.org/news/2025-03-older-thought-key-constituent-galaxies.html