SPACE — Astronomers have for the first time discovered the right conditions for the formation of new worlds like Earth. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected water in the deep region of the planet-forming disk of gas and dust surrounding a baby star.
The detection is important because water, along with other molecules needed to form worlds like Earth, was found near several massive young stars that produce extreme ultraviolet radiation. Such extreme environments were previously thought to be unsuitable for the formation of rocky planets.
However, the new discovery suggests Earth-like planets may be capable of forming in a wider range of cosmic environments than previously thought. These findings could help scientists better understand how planets in the solar system, like our Earth, formed about 4.5 billion years ago.
This research also represents the first results from JWST’s eXtreme Ultraviolet Environments (XUE) program. The instrument is tasked with characterizing the environment and chemistry of the large disk of dust, gas and rock rotating around the young star. Ultimately, the disk produced planets, asteroids and comets.
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“JWST is the only telescope with the spatial resolution and sensitivity to study planet-forming disks in massive star-forming regions,” said research team leader Maria Claudia Ramirez-Tannus, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, quoted by Live Science, Wednesday, 6 December 2023.
Ramirez-Tannus and his colleagues detailed this discovery in a paper published November 30 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Discovery of New Earth-Forming Materials
The first results from the XUE campaign came from observations of a protoplanetary disk named XUE 1, located in the Pismis 24 star cluster.
The Lobster Nebula is one of the youngest and closest regions of intense star birth. It also hosts some of the most massive stars in the Milky Way, which are hotter than stars like the Sun and therefore emit more ultraviolet light.
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In the formation of planets, this radiation will clean off gas and dust left over from the birth of young massive stars. This means that protoplanetary disks cannot survive for long around a fierce star, usually only about 1 million years.
Therefore, the research team was surprised to find that the protoplanetary disk was also filled with small silicate dust, some of which was crystalline. Such dust usually serves as a building block for rocky planets. In addition to silicate dust and water, researchers also found traces of molecules such as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, hydrogen cyanide and acetylene.
“We were surprised and excited because this is the first time these molecules have been detected under extreme conditions,” study co-author Lars Cuijpers, a researcher at Radboud University in the Netherlands, said in a statement.
2023-12-07 04:41:00
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