Is frozen water scattered in systems around other stars? Astronomers have long expected it to be based in part on previous detection of gaseous forms, water vapor and its presence in our own solar system.
Now there is definite evidence: researchers have confirmed the presence of crystalline ice in a dusty debris disk, which uses detailed data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (NASA James Webb Space Telescope) around the sunny star 155 light-year distance. (The word water ice defines its composition, as many other frozen molecules are also observed in the space, such as carbon dioxide ice or "dry ice".
"Webber has clearly detected not only water ice, but also found crystallization Water ice can also be found in places such as Saturn's rings and cold corpses in Kuiper Belt in the solar system.
All frozen water Webb detected is paired with fine dust particles on the entire disk, such as "Dirty Snowball". The results were published Wednesday in Nature magazine.
Astronomers have been waiting for these determined data for decades. “When I was a graduate student 25 years ago, my consultant told me that there should be ICE in the debris disc, but before Weber, we didn’t have enough sensitive instruments to do these observations,” said Christine Chen, co-author and collaborative astronomer at the Baltimore Space Telescope Science School. "Most strikingly, these data look similar to other latest observations of the Kuiper belt objects in our own solar system."
Water ice is an important component in the disk around young stars - it seriously affects the formation of giant planets and may also be transmitted by small objects such as comets and asteroids to fully formed rocky planets. Now that researchers have discovered Webb's water ice, they have studied for all researchers how these processes work in new ways in many other planetary systems.
This star, classified HD 181327, is younger than our sun. It is estimated that compared to the 4.6 billion years of the sun's maturity, it has a history of 23 million years. The stars are slightly larger than the sun and are hotter, which leads to the formation of a slightly larger system around them.
Weber's observations confirm a significant gap between the star and its debris disk, a vast area without dust. Further apart, its clastic disc resembles the Cooper belt of our solar system, where the planets, comets and other ice and rocks of dwarfs were found (sometimes colliding with each other). Billions of years ago, our Kuiper belt might be similar to the star's fragment disk.
“HD 181327 is a very active system,” Chen said. "There are conventional, continuous collisions on the debris disks. When those cold bodies collide, they release a small piece of dusty water ice particles that are perfect for Webb detection."
In the entire system, water ice is not evenly distributed. Most people are the coldest and the farthest from stars. "The outer area of the debris disk includes more than 20% of the water ice," Xie said.
The researchers looked at it up close and the less water ice they found. In the middle of the debris dish, Webber detected about 8% of the water ice. Here, frozen water particles may be produced at a faster rate than they are destroyed. Weber hardly detects it in the area closest to the star's clot disk. The ultraviolet light of the star may evaporate the spots closest to water ice. Rocks that Webber cannot detect may also be "locked" to frozen water by rocks called planets.
The team and more researchers will continue to look for water ice in debris disks and actively form planetary systems in our galaxy. "The existence of water ice helps promote planet formation," Xie said. "Ice-cold materials may also eventually be 'transmitted' to terrestrial planets, which may have formed in such systems for hundreds of millions of years."
The researchers observed HD 181327 with Webb's NIRSPEC (near infrared spectrometer) that this was very sensitive to extremely weak dust particles that could only be detected from space.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world's leading space science observatory. Weber is solving the mysteries in our solar system, transcending the distant world around other stars, and exploring the mysterious structure and origin of our universe and where we are. Weber is an international program of NASA and its partners ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Space Canada).
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Laura Betz -laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD.
Claire Blome -cblome@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD.
Christine Chicken -cpulliam@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD.
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