Discovering The “Missing Link” In The Search For The Origin Of Water In Our Solar System
Scientists studying the formation of a distant star inside a dusty cloud have found what they say is the "missing link" in the search for the source of water in our solar system.
Scientists say the star located 1,300 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Orion, can finally explain the origins of water on Earth.
The protostar is called V883 Orionis, and it is a young star surrounded by a huge disk of material that will one day fuse to form larger bodies, such as planets, orbiting it.
In this disc, scientists discovered gaseous water with a chemical composition close to that found in comets orbiting the Earth. This is vital evidence that the water that comets brought to ancient Earth came from gas clouds older than the sun.
"We can now trace the origins of water in our solar system back before the formation of the sun," said John J. Tobin, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the United States of America and lead author of the study published today in the journal Nature.
The team of astronomers used ALMA, or the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), a large radio telescope in Chile, to search for the chemical signatures of the water in the cloud.
Previous research has shown that water in solar system comets is similar to water on Earth, indicating that previous comets may have delivered it to our planet. But there was a missing link in the process: the one that connected young stars to comets. And now, in new findings, scientists have finally filled that void.
Tobin explained: “The measurement we made kind of fills in the big gap in our knowledge of what happens between the protostar stage, when the star is first being created, versus comets, where it is kind of a remnant of the planet formation process. We've never been able to measure the composition of water in a protoplanetary disk before."
Tobin continued: “V883 Orionis is the missing link in this case. The composition of the water in the disk is very similar to that of comets in our solar system. This confirms the idea that water in planetary systems was formed billions of years ago, before the sun, in interstellar space, and was inherited by both comets and Earth, relatively unchanged.
In total, the team found that V883 Orionis contains at least 1,200 times as much water as Earth's oceans. The team plans to conduct more observations to better see the water in its gaseous state in such discs.
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