'Missing link' for Earth's water found around remote baby star
By Ben Turner published about 5 hours ago
Astronomers have spotted water that looks remarkably similar to our own in orbit around a young star 1,300 light years from Earth.
A time-lapse of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) used to detect the distant water, a cosmic fireball is seen streaming across the sky at the bottom left.
A time-lapse of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) used to detect the distant water, a cosmic fireball is seen streaming across the sky at the bottom left. (Image credit: ESO/C. Malin)
Astronomers studying a remote baby star have found a "missing link" that could finally explain the origins of water on Earth, a new study suggests.
By training a powerful radio telescope at V883 Orionis, a protostar 1,300 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Orion, astronomers have spotted gaseous water with a chemical composition close to the one found in comets around Earth. This is vital evidence that water delivered by comets to ancient Earth came from gas clouds older than the sun.
Astronomers previously observed water moving from gas clouds to planet-forming disks around young stars, and then later from comets to planets. But the missing link in the chain — the step from young stars to comets — has proven elusive. Now, in new findings published Mar. 8 in the journal Nature(opens in new tab), researchers have finally filled in the blank.
"V883 Orionis is the missing link in this case," lead author John J. Tobin(opens in new tab), an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, in Charlottesville, West Virginia, said in a statement(opens in new tab). "The composition of the water in the disc is very similar to that of comets in our own solar system. This is confirmation of the idea that the water in planetary systems formed billions of years ago, before the Sun, in interstellar space, and has been inherited by both comets and Earth, relatively unchanged."
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https://www.livescience.com/missing-link-for-Earths-water-found-around-remote-baby-star