Discovery of heavy water around a young star – | RCO News Agency

According to Mehr news agency, citing Space, researchers using the ALMA telescope managed to identify heavy water in the disk containing planet-forming dust of a young star named V883 Orionis. The ALMA telescope is a network of radio dishes in Chile. This star is located at a distance of about 1350 light years from Earth and in the star cluster of the Orion Nebula.

According to researchers, normal water consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, but in some hydrogen atoms, in addition to a proton, there is also a neutron. This isotope, called deuterium, makes the resulting molecule heavy water instead of normal water. Heavy water has also been discovered in the comets of the solar system, and its ratio to normal water provides scientists with valuable information about the history of the formation of celestial bodies.

ALMA observations showed that strong shocks and explosions in young stars can destroy heavy water and turn it into ordinary water. But in the case of the star V883 Ori, the ratio of heavy water to ordinary water was much higher than that found in the Solar System; For this reason, the researchers concluded that this water probably existed before the formation of the star itself.

“What we observed shows that the water seen in this star-forming disk is older than the star itself and was formed during the early stages of star and planet formation,” says Margot Limker, head of the research team from the University of Milan.

This finding is an important step in understanding how water is transported in the process of planet formation and shows that the water in the solar system and perhaps on Earth may have formed billions of years before the birth of the sun, when it covered the dust grains in early molecular clouds in the form of ice.