To Better understand the properties of water we begin our journey of discovery with the original love story: the creation of life itself.
Although space may appear empty, it is filled with a galactic tide of energy, gas and dust - the left over remnants from the violent death of stars. Around 4.5 billion years ago waves of evergy traveling though space pressed clouds of such particles closer together until gravity caused the cloud to collapse into a disc and the disc began to spin. At the center of which coalesced a ball of hydrogen and helium to form a protostar that would eventually become the sun. Still in this womb, the sun was not yet power by fusion. Over tens of millions of years the mass of the protostar increased as did its spinning velocity and pressure igniting the fusion of hydrogen which fuels the sun to this day.
The wonder of sunlight and starlight is that it sets the universal speed limiit at 186, 282 miles per second, faster than anything else, traversing trillions of miles in absolute slience yet it can be stopped by a mere outstretched hand. There would be no impact since the mass of a photon is zero. In fact, a photon ceases to exist upon contact as its energy is absorved by whatever it touches. In a sense light isn't there. Yet it is upon this loom of starlight all matter precipitates.
The formation of the sun didn't take up all of the cloud it was born from. The rest became the solar system with noncarbanaceous material (intert rock such as earth) swooned closer to the sun forming the planets. While carbanacous matereal (containing H2O) swirled around the outer solar system far from the sun. The only deviation from this order was the occassional coment thrust from the Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud by gravitational pertubations in the galactic tide caused by passing stars. The appearance of a comet is called an apparition.
Around 4.4 billion years ago, one such comet collided with the planet earth. Only it was no apparition but the size of Mars. The collision was so massive it led to the formation of the moon and altered the very composition of the planet by bringing water to earth. Scientists named this comet Theia after the ancient greek Titan also know as Eurphassa ("wideshiing") - mother to Helios (the Sun), Selene (the Moon) and Eos (The Dawn). Without Theia there would be no water, without water there would be no life - no rainbows to be seen from earth and no outstetched hand to catch the endless light.