An international study led by researchers from the Institute of Space Sciences, from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya has discovered that carbonaceous chondrites, a class of meteorites, incorporated hydrated minerals along with organic material from the protoplanetary disk before the formation of planets. The researchers, who have published their results in the journal Space Science Reviews, note that these meteorites played “an important role in the primordial Earth’s water enrichment” because they facilitated the transportation of volatile elements that were accumulated in the external regions of the so-called protoplanetary disk from which planets were formed.