Water in PDS 70 Star System's Protoplanetary Disc | James Webb Space Telescope

Water in PDS 70 Star System's Protoplanetary Disc | James Webb Space Telescope

This spectrum of the protoplanetary disk of PDS 70, obtained with Webb’s MIRI instrument, displays a number of emission lines from water vapor.

This artist concept portrays the star PDS 70 and its inner protoplanetary disc. 

New measurements from the NASA/European Space Agency/Canadian Space Agency James Webb Space Telescope’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) have indicated the presence of water vapor in the inner disc of the system PDS 70, located 370 light-years away. This is the first detection of water in the terrestrial region of a disc already known to host two or more protoplanets.

New insights may come from the system PDS 70, which hosts an inner disc and an outer disc that are separated by a gap of eight billion kilometers, within which are two known gas-giant planets. MIRI has detected water vapor in the system’s inner disc at distances of less than 160 million kilometres from the star—the region where rocky, terrestrial planets may be forming (the Earth orbits 150 million kilometers from our Sun).

PDS 70 is a K-type star, cooler than our Sun, and is estimated to be 5.4 million years old. This is relatively old amongst stars with planet-forming discs, which made the discovery of water vapor surprising.

Astronomers have not yet detected any planets forming within the inner disc of PDS 70. However, they do see the raw materials for building rocky worlds, in the form of silicates. The detection of water vapor implies that if rocky planets are forming there, they will have water available to them from the beginning.

"We’ve seen water in other discs, but not so close in and in a system where planets are currently assembling. We couldn’t make this type of measurement before Webb,” said lead author Giulia Perotti of a new science paper at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany.

“This discovery is extremely exciting, as it probes the region where rocky planets similar to Earth typically form,” added MPIA director Thomas Henning, a co-author of the paper. Henning is co-principal investigator of Webb’s MIRI (Mid-InfraRed Instrument), which made the detection, and the principal investigator of the MINDS (MIRI Mid-Infrared Disk Survey) program that took the data.

Science paper: 

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06317-9

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted (STScI)

Release Date: July 24, 2023

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