James Webb telescope finds ice older than the star it orbits
摘要
天文学家利用詹姆斯·韦布空间望远镜在绘架座β星周围的碎片盘中探测到水冰和二氧化碳冰。该星约2000万岁，距地球约64光年，周围尘埃盘正在形成行星。研究发现水冰呈玻璃态而非结晶态，并与二氧化碳以类似太阳系彗星的比例混合，提示富水世界所需成分可能在年轻恒星周围普遍存在。
Beta Pictoris is a young star, roughly 20 million years old, and located about 64 light-years away from Earth. It is surrounded by a vast disk of dust and rubble where planets are still forming—astronomers have already found three. In a new Science study, a team led by Sarah Betti, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, used the James Webb Space Telescope to look for ice in this disk. Researchers found both water and carbon dioxide ice.
The water ice is glassy rather than crystalline, and it is mixed with carbon dioxide in roughly the same proportions we see in comets of our own Solar System. This suggests ingredients necessary to form water-rich worlds might be common around young stars.
The missing ice
Beta Pictoris is one of the best studied stars in the sky. Its disk was among the first ever imaged, back in 1984, and we see it almost exactly edge-on, which makes it a natural laboratory for studying how planetary systems grow. It's what astronomers call a debris disk, where the dust is constantly replenished by collisions among comets and planetesimals, small bodies that are the building blocks of planets.
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