For decades, what researchers knew about planet formation was based primarily on our own Solar System. It is widely agreed that Earth and the other rocky planets accreted from the disk of dust and gas that surrounded our Sun in its youth. However, the explosion of exoplanet research over the past decade has offered new and different approaches to modeling the Earth’s embryonic state. Using a newly developed model, researchers were able to demonstrate that early in Earth’s existence, our planet’s water could have originated from interactions between the hydrogen-rich atmospheres and magma oceans of the planetary embryos that comprised Earth’s formative years. Their findings could explain not only the abundance of Earth’s water, but also its current overall oxidized state.