Water Vapor Seen 'Raining Down' on Young Star System
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected enough water vapor to fill the oceans on Earth five times inside the collapsing nest of a forming star system. Astronomers say the water vapor is pouring down from the system's natal cloud and smacking into a dusty disk where planets are thought to form.
The observations provide the first direct look at how water, an essential ingredient for life as we know it, begins to make its way into planets, possibly even rocky ones like our own.
2 comments:
If we keep looking, it's only a matter of time before we catch an ecosystem in the act of being born. One year, we'll find that a rocky terrestrial we last looked at a century previously suddenly has huge amounts of oxygen in its atmosphere.
That will indeed be a great thing Chris..Once the Earth had copious amounts of Oxygen then it was quickly absorbed into the ground or oceans giving it a red tinge just as Mars has now...and now its returned and its a beautiful blue from space
Sys
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