The James Webb Space Telescope has found water and carbon dioxide ice circling Beta Pictoris, a star so young that the ice is older than the star itself.
A team led by Sarah Betti of the Space Telescope Science Institute spotted the ice in the star’s debris disk, according to Ars Technica. The study appears in the journal Science.
Beta Pictoris sits about 64 light-years from Earth and is roughly 20 million years old. Planets are still forming in the disk of dust and rock around it, and collisions between comets and small bodies keep replenishing that disk.
Webb picked up the ice in spectra from two regions about 100 astronomical units from the star. The water ice is glassy rather than crystalline, and it is mixed with carbon dioxide in proportions close to those found in comets in our own Solar System. Carbon dioxide makes up about 11 per cent of the ice.
Earlier searches had found no water vapour and no water-ice signal at the 3-micrometer wavelength. The new result suggests the building blocks of water-rich worlds are inherited from the cloud of gas and dust that formed the star, and that such ingredients may be common around young stars.
Source: Ars Technica
