Water found in young star NGC 1333-IRAS-4B

William Atkins
Thursday, 30 August 2007 20:16

Science - Space

The NASA Spitzer Space Telescope has found abundant amounts of water vapor inside a young star system that could likely be forming planets. The discovery is the first of its kind—to provide direct evidence of water beginning to interact in a planet-forming star system.

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From the August 29, 2007 NASA website "Water Vapor Seen ‘Raining Down’ on Young Star System", Dan Watson, University of Rochester, New York, United States, says, "For the first time, we are seeing water being delivered to the region where planets will most likely form,"

The article that features the results of Watson and his fellow researchers appear in the Friday, August 30, 2007 issue of the journal Nature. The other researchers include: Chris Bohac, Chat Hull, Bill Forrest, Ben Sargent, Joel Green and Kyoung Hee Kim of the University of Rochester; Elise Furlan of the University of California at Los Angeles; Joan Najita of the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory; Nuria Calvet and Lee Hartmann of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Paola d’Alessio of the National Autonomous University of Mexico; and Jim Houck of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

The Watson team, while using the Spitzer telescope, saw ice water falling at supersonic speeds from the envelope (a cocoon, of sorts) surrounding the star to a protoplanetary disk of planet-forming material found closer to the the star.

When the ice water gets to the disk it begins to vaporize upon contact with the encircling dust and gases. It will eventually freeze back to ice water, most likely, the atronomers conjecture, into comets and asteroids. Such dynamic action within a young star system is conducive for the formation of planets.

From their studies of the NGC 1333-IRAS-4B star system, the astronomers have already calculated that the radius of the disk is about 3.6 billion miles (5.8 billion kilometers), its density is at least 160 billion hydrogen molecules per cubic inch (10 billion hydrogen molecules per cubic centimter), and its temperature is about 154 degrees Fahrenheit (-103 degrees Celsius).

NGC 1333-IRAS-4B is being called by astronomers a "warm, dense blob of material" because it is such a young, still forming, star. It is located about one thousand light-years away from Earth in the constellation Perseus. As the material engulfs the early star it will make the star grow larger. Astronomers will not know how large the star will become until after this process is completed.

Watson states, "Since the disk is what's eventually going to give rise to the planetary system around the star, what we are seeing is the process by which that disk formed and therefore the initial conditions of planetary formation."

The Watson team is confident that their research into the NGC 1333-IRAS-4B star system will teach them much about the origin of protoplanetary disks (rotating disks of dense gas and dust) that form around young, early forming, stars--which eventually will form planets like Earth and, maybe, sometime,  even the first hint of primitive life.