It rains in young galaxies

  

galaxies

The Spitzer Space Telescope NASA has detected enough water vapor to the oceans on Earth five times to fill in a collapsing nest of a forming star system. Astronomers say the water vapor of the system from the natal cloud and deposited on a dusty disk where planets are thought to be formed.The observatory provides a first look at how water, an essential ingredient for life as we know it, find its way to the planet, possibly even rocky ones like here on Earth occur."For the first time we see the water flow to an area where possible planets are formed," said Dan Watson of the University of Rochester, New York. Watson is the main author of the scientific article on "steamy" young galaxies that on August 30 in the journal Nature will be published.The galaxy, NGC 1333-IRAS 4B called, is still growing within a cocoon of cold gas and dust. In this cocoon, around a star, is a very hot disk of planet-forming material. The data from the Spitzer telescope has suggested that ice from the outside of the cocoon falls toward the forming star and vaporizing as it hits the disk."On Earth, water arrived from icy asteroids and comets. Most of the water is in the form of ice in the dense clouds that form stars," says Watson. "We have now seen that the water in the form of ice from a young star on the disk, actually vaporizes when it hits the disk. This water vapor will later freeze again into asteroids and comets."There is water everywhere in the universe. It is found in the form of gas and ice around various types of stars and the spaces between them, and recently Spitzer has discovered water on a hot gas planet outside our solar system, called HD 189733b.The water forms an important role in the study of the formation of planets with Spitzer Space Telescope. By examining what happens to the water of the NGC 1333-IRAS 4B, scientists learn more about the planet-forming disk. For example, the density of the disk measured (at least 10 billion hydrogen molecules per cubic centimeter), its size (a diameter larger than the average distance between the Earth and Pluto) and its temperature (about -100 degrees Celsius)."Water is easier to detect than other molecules, we can use it as a tool for the composition and shape of the brand new drive to explore," says Watson. "We could learn how planets are formed."Watson and his colleagues studied 30 of the youngest known stellar embryos using Spitzer's infrared spectrograph, an instrument that splits infrared light into a rainbow of wavelengths, revealing the "fingerprint" of the molecule is visible from the 30 stellar embryos forming disk, and they found only NGC 1333-IRAS 4B is a large amount of water vapor. This vapor is readily detectable by Spitzer because the ice planet-forming disk touches and very rapidly heats up and glows with infrared light.Why is there only one of the 30 stars embryos water? Astronomers say it probably is because NGC 1333-IRAS 4B is in the right corner of the Spitzer telescope to the compact core to see. In addition, this water cycle of short-lived and difficult to detect."We have a unique stage in the formation of young star's evolution, when the stuff life is moving dynamically into an environment where planets could arise," said Michael Werner, project scientist for the Spitzer mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory , Pasadena, California.NGC 1333-IRAS 4B is in a pretty star-forming region about 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Perseus. Its central stellar embryo "feeds" is still around with the material itself and is still growing. In this early stage, astronomers can not say how big the star will ultimately become.






        

Other authors of the article Chris Bohac, Chat Hull, Bill Forrest, Ben Sargent, Joel Green and Kyoung Hee Kim of the University of Rochester, Elise Furlan of the University of California at Los Angeles, Joan Najita of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory; Nuria Calvet and Lee Hartmann of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Paola D'Alessio of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and Jim Houck of Cornell University, Ithaca, NYJPL manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Scientific research is conducted from the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The infrared spectrograph on the Spitzer was built by Cornell University. The development was led by coauthor Houck. Watson and Forrest are both members of the team that built the spectrograph.