How can it be that the Sun is older than the Earth, but the water that we drink is older than the Sun?

Current formation modell suggests that our solar system began as a huge ingathering of material, that over time it began to revolve in a roughly disk shape around the center, and in the center the large portion of the material gathered. As time passed, the mass of this central body was sufficient that hydrogen began to fuse into helium. With fusion comes the release of a lot of energy, and the Sun is formed.

The outer parts of the disk formed into rings, and within each ring, a predominant body or bodies began to take form, and eventually, the remaining body in that ring absorbed or ejected everything else in its ring. A planet is forming. The sun came into existence first, and the planets gradually over millions of years moved around in their orbits and in some cases may have even crashed into one another, and today we have a fairly stable set-up which has been roughly this way for a very long time.

The water, on the other hand, is a wedding of hydrogen and oxygen. This is a pretty stable molecule, and it is actually difficult to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen. Water came about probably early in the history of the Universe, long before the cloud that would form our solar system was even formed from ejecta of other stars. One argument that water is older than the solar system is that in our planet, we find enormous amounts of elements other than hydrogen, helium, carbon, etc. The theory is that these heavy elements did not exist at the beginning of the Universe; they only came into being through explosive reactions in dying stars. Thus we know there were stars long before the solar system. These exploded and created the elements we see here today. All of the elements of the sun, the earth and all planets, etc. — all of them, without exception — are star-stuff.

Clouds of hydrogen of various densities are found all around the Universe, since originally, everything in the Universe was hydrogen. After a few stars blew up, there was probably a lot of oxygen, among other things. When oxygen and hydrogen meet, they can form water molecules, so this happened very early.

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