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Think your town is rainy? Try living on a planet still in the process of formation, where five whole oceans of water might come raining out of space at supersonic speed.
Astronomers at the University of Rochester said Wednesday that they've observed this short-lived process of pre-planetary rainfall for what seems to be the first time in astronomical history (or, to be fair, at least the first time by Earth-based astronomers).
The group is using the Spitzer Space Telescope to observe an embryonic star in a nebula called NGC 1333, about 1000 light years from Earth. They've found infrared evidence of water vapor in the surrounding area, which appears to be one of the key moments in the development of a planetary system around such a star.
The most likely explanation for the observations, they say, is that icy material is falling or has fallen from the envelope that birthed the star onto a dense, surrounding disc. It is precisely within this kind of disc formation that planets are believed to develop.
"Icy material from the envelope is in free-fall, reaching supersonic speeds and crashing into the protoplanetary disk," said Rochester physics professor Dan Watson, the lead author on the paper describing the observations, in a press release. "The ice vaporizes on impact, and the warm water vapor emits a distinctive spectrum of infrared light.
That light is what we measured. From the details of the measured spectrum we can tease out the physical details of this brand-new, pre-planetary disk."
Researchers said that the "puddle" forming on the disc's surface holds about enough water to fill five of our oceans, but spread over an area that could be encompassed by the orbit of Pluto. At a temperature of
170 degrees Kelvin, or 153 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, it's not exactly navigable waters yet.
Along with providing an unprecedented view into the formation of a planetary system, the research offers a new look at how icy material in our own solar system might have been formed, the paper's authors said.
The material in the outer reaches of our own neighborhood has generally been viewed as "pure, interstellar ice," Watson said.
However, these new observations show that it too may have gone through a vaporization and re-freezing process as our own solar system coalesced, potentially changing its chemical balance.
The team's findings are being published in today's issue of Nature (subscription required).
(Photo one: Artist's representation of protoplanetary disc. Credit:
NASA. Photo two: The NGC 1333 nebula, with the IRAS 4-b star's location marked. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Gutermuth (Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics)
