NASA’s James Webb Telescope Just Found Frozen Water Around Another Star

Water ice is a crucial building block of planetary systems. We've found plenty of it in our own Solar System, in places like Europa, Mars, and wayward comets, but we've never made a definitive detection of frozen water around other stars. Plenty of water vapor, yes, but no (d)ice.

But that just changed. Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, a team of astronomers have confirmed the presence of water ice in a debris disk encircling a young, Sun-like star just 155 light years away. And tantalizingly, it's the same kind of ice found in our own system.

"Webb unambiguously detected not just water ice, but crystalline water ice, which is also found in locations like Saturn's rings and icy bodies in our Solar System's Kuiper Belt," said Chen Xie, an assistant research scientist at Johns Hopkins University and lead author of a new study published in the journal Nature, in a statement about the work. 

We tend to think of water in biological terms — as a key ingredient for life. But frozen chunks of the stuff play just as influential a role in the formation of giant planets, which, with their incredible mass, are themselves a huge determinant of a planetary system's structure. Icy bodies can clump together to kickstart planetary formation, and they could also bring water to existing worlds. In fact, that could explain how Earth got its water.

The findings, therefore, have paved the way to exploring water ice's role outside our solar system.

"The presence of water ice helps facilitate planet formation," Xie said. "Icy materials may also ultimately be 'delivered' to terrestrial planets that may form over a couple hundred million years in systems like this."

The star at the heart of the discovery, HD 181327, is practically an infant at just 23 million years old, compared to the Sun's 4.6 billion years. It is both slightly more massive than our star, and hotter, with a larger system surrounding it.

There's a vast stretch of empty space between the star and its debris disk where the water ice was found, Webb observations confirmed. Like "dirty snowballs," the ice chunks are caked in particles of dust.

"There are regular, ongoing collisions in its debris disk," explained coauthor Christine Chen, an associate astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, in the statement.  "When those icy bodies collide, they release tiny particles of dusty water ice that are perfectly sized for Webb to detect." 

Most of the water ice is found farther away from the star, with the debris disk's outer area consisting of over 20 percent water ice, Xie said. Meanwhile, in the middle of the disk, Webb only detected 8 percent water ice, where water particles are likely produced slightly faster than they're vaporized.

But in the region nearest the star, there was almost none to be found. There, the astronomers believe that the star's ultraviolet light vaporizes the ice chunks, and if any survive, they might be hidden from Webb's eye, trapped inside chunks of rock called planetesimals, which serve as the building blocks of planets.

Strikingly, the debris disk appears remarkably similar to our Solar System's Kuiper Belt, a ring of comets, dwarf planets, and icy objects that lie just beyond the outermost planet, Neptune. 

That could hint at a pattern in how planetary systems evolve across the cosmos. It may be more than a coincidence that the first confirmed water ice we're seeing around another star mirrors the distribution of our Solar System. Only future observations — and probably with the James Webb — will tell.

More on space: Astronomers Stunned as Epic Mars Aurora Covers Entire Planet

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