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
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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 Science 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.
Locating faraway reservoirs of water is generally hampered by the abundant water vapor in Earth's own atmosphere, which clouds the view of ground-based telescopes. That is not a problem for Herschel, a large far-infrared/sub-millimeter–spectrum telescope stationed 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, well beyond the orbit of the moon. From its unobstructed vantage point, Herschel's spectrometer located a small amount of water vapor coming off of TW Hydrae's dusty protoplanetary disk at a distance of roughly 100 astronomical units, or 100 times the Earth–sun distance, from the star.
The very presence of vapor so far from TW Hydrae points to an interaction between the star's radiation and the ice in the disk. "We know that at these distances the temperature is so low that it should be frozen," says lead study author Michiel Hogerheijde, an astronomer at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. But ultraviolet (UV) radiation emanating from TW Hydrae should liberate some water molecules from icy dust grains in the protoplanetary disk, in a process known as photodesorption.
Having measured how much water vapor is produced by photodesorption, Hogerheijde and his colleagues were able to fashion a rough estimate of the amount of ice present in the disk. "We know the efficiency of this photodesorption process very well," he says. "We know that we need to have an underlying reservoir of several thousands times Earth's oceans to produce this small amount of vapor."
TW Hydrae joins a small number of nascent planetary systems that have been found to contain water in some form, either as hot vapor close to the star or as cold ice in the outer protoplanetary disk. In those past instances, though, it has been "relatively hard to actually quantify how much water ice was present," Hogerheijde says. "We've always thought that there should be a large amount, but we just didn't know, because there's no data."
With a relatively clear look at one planetary system to compare with our own, astronomers can now more confidently ponder the existence of distant, watery worlds. For if TW Hydrae develops rocky worlds, there should be plenty of icy leftovers on the outskirts of the planetary system to supply those worlds with water, in much the same way that comets and asteroids may have provided for Earth billions of years ago. "If the mechanism that delivered Earth's oceans happened here, it may be happening in other solar systems as well," Hogerheijde says.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe science is great, but I wonder how the young star got it's water?
Did it generate it or get it from somewhere else? If it generated it, why can't the earth have generated it's own also?
Then it is proposes that life began somewhere else, where did the somewhere else get its life?
The big one of course is that where did the dust cloud come from that purportedly coalesced into galaxies and stars? Did the cloud start as individual particles around a nebulous center of a gravity which itself is an unknown phenomena from an unknown source?
Where, what and how strong is the force required to load plutonium with the power it releases in an "atomic" explosion? or any other matter capable of being "fissioned" off? Tesla believed the power was not intrinsic and neither does "The Dynamic Ether" proposition.
read proposed for proposes
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat I think this should really be recognized as is yet another in the long list of reasons not to fall victim to what Isaac Asimov called, "Planetary Bigotry". That means that it is kind of absurd to think that we need to focus only on stars with habitable planets as places to aim for. It makes a thousand-times more sense to gather the resources that you need from things like asteroid, belts, smaller moons and planets, dust rings, essentially---and build ships and stations to live on from those materials.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhere in the article did they talk about life at all, let alone forming somewhere else. I am not sure what you are referring to.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen the majority of mankind stops being so self-centered, and arrogant, believing that we are the only life in the universe, I will be a happy camper. Most people have no concept of the size of the universe until you watch science programs and videos for endless hours. It actually takes that long to just begin to sink in. Proving of course, in my opinion, that we are but an insignificant accident that happened in the universe and that other accidents have happened and will continue to do so. The older I get, the more research I do, the more I learn. Wow, science is magic and that's what makes us able to grow intellectually.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen did this happen like for example when did scientist find all this information
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA very good question bry633...from links in this article it seems the space-borne European Herschel telescope was launched in 2009. The report of a faint signature of water vapor from TW Hydrae's disk was received for publication 25th of May 2011, accepted for publication 20th of September 2011 in the October 21 edition of "Science".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe lead researcher is Dr. Michiel Hogerheijde
Leiden Observatory, P.O. Box 9513, 2300 RA, Leiden, The Netherlands
Publ. 10/20/2011
Question: By what process(es)is water created in the universe? Saying that the water on earth came from comets begs the question. Where does the water in the universe come from? Answers,please.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you burn, or oxidize, hydrogen, the byproduct is water.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis question are interesting.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe see this planets with telescope and photos!
Unfortunately, we haven t technology to explore this exoplanet.
In my, opinion if this planets have water, oxygen, perhaps have life! Maybe rudimentary life!
Maybe this planet is like at our earth in the prime years!
When one planet explode, the meteorites have rudimentary life! And comet too!
When the meteorites fall in the earth, this life grow up with life of earth.
Maybe, in space have water in the different type!
As per Scientific American report on 26-10-2011, from internet, “A protoplanetary disk 175 light-years away looks to contain enough water to coat newborn planets with oceans thousands of times over”,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is possible to find the distance of this planet as :
One light year = 9.4605x10^17 cm .
So, 175 light year = 1.6555875x10^20 cm. This value almost equal to NA / 2R = 1.65181156x10^20 cm. Where NA = Avogadro number = 6.0221367x10^23 and R = ratio of mass atom and electron. = 1822.88853. I calculate the distance of solar system, stars, galaxies through a simple equation which described in my book COMPLETE UNIFIED THEORY, the calculated results tallied beautifully to the experimental results. You can get this book from SB Berlin PK. Search Short List-[ Translate ], Andy Evans. Berlin [u.a] : Springer, 2000. Buch, Complete unified theory / Nirmalendu Das. 1. ed. Guwahati [u.a.] : Bani Prokash, 1998.
The book complete unified theory is unparallel and unique book in the scientific world. Because, this is single theory. This theory is applicable to all fields from the particle to the universe. How the universe was created, birth of stars, max. mass of the universe, why the universe is expanding, birth of particles, structure of an electron, structure of electromagnetic radiations, quantum circulation of black hole, lot of things are there. There is no variation between the calculated and experimental results. ---- Nirmalendu Das. Email: nirmalgopa@gmail.com , nirmalendu337@gmail.com
Dated: 24-01-2012.
As per Scientific American report on 26-10-2011, from internet, “A protoplanetary disk 175 light-years away looks to contain enough water to coat newborn planets with oceans thousands of times over”,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is possible to find the distance of this planet as :
One light year = 9.4605x10^17 cm .
So, 175 light year = 1.6555875x10^20 cm. This value almost equal to NA / 2R = 1.65181156x10^20 cm. Where NA = Avogadro number = 6.0221367x10^23 and R = ratio of mass atom and electron. = 1822.88853. I calculate the distance of solar system, stars, galaxies through a simple equation which described in my book COMPLETE UNIFIED THEORY, the calculated results tallied beautifully to the experimental results. You can get this book from SB Berlin PK. Search Short List-[ Translate ], Andy Evans. Berlin [u.a] : Springer, 2000. Buch, Complete unified theory / Nirmalendu Das. 1. ed. Guwahati [u.a.] : Bani Prokash, 1998.
The book complete unified theory is unparallel and unique book in the scientific world. Because, this is single theory. This theory is applicable to all fields from the particle to the universe. How the universe was created, birth of stars, max. mass of the universe, why the universe is expanding, birth of particles, structure of an electron, structure of electromagnetic radiations, quantum circulation of black hole, lot of things are there. There is no variation between the calculated and experimental results. ---- Nirmalendu Das. Email: nirmalgopa@gmail.com , nirmalendu337@gmail.com
Dated: 24-01-2012.
Exactly. And since Stars are basically giant Hydrogen fusion reactors, this makes water the most abundant compound in the universe. You would be very hard pressed to *not* find at least some small traces of water on any given planet.
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