A protoplanetary disk 175 light-years away looks to contain enough water to coat newborn planets with oceans thousands of times over
| October 24, 2011
ICE RING: An artist's conception of the disk around the young star TW Hydrae shows the presumed location of abundant water ice in blue. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
To become a world bathed in oceans of water and habitable, Earth first had to take a beating. A popular hypothesis holds that icy comets and asteroids pummeling early Earth delivered the planet's water from the icy outer reaches of the solar system.
Rocky, terrestrial worlds in other planetary systems might become watery by the same process, but assessing just how much ice is available to distant, newborn planets has been challenging. With the help of the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory, however, astronomers have gotten a good look at the seeds of a planetary system around a young star 175 light-years away, and there seems to be plenty of water to go around.
The researchers used Herschel to scan the protoplanetary disk around the 10-million-year-old star TW Hydrae, one of the nearest such disks available for study. (Protoplanetary disks are the swirling pancakes of dust and gas surrounding young stars that can coalesce over millions of years, as the sun's disk did, into terrestrial planets and gas giants.) The astronomers reported in the October 21 issue of that they picked up a faint signature of water vapor from TW Hydrae's disk, which they presume emanates from a much larger reservoir. The icy outer portion of the disk probably contains enough water to fill Earth's oceans thousands of times over, the researchers estimate.
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