Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers discovered water and organic molecules in a planet-forming disk around a young star in an extreme environment, revealing that Earth-like planets could form even under harsh conditions. Credit: SciTechDaily.com
The disk, which the astronomers call XUE-1, is exposed to intense ultraviolet radiation of nearby hot, massive stars. Yet even in this harsh environment, the observations detected both water and simple organic molecules. Ramírez-Tannus says: “This result is unexpected and exciting! It shows that there are favorable conditions to form Earth-like planets and the ingredients for life even in the harshest environments in our Galaxy.
Massive stars are perforce very bright, giving off large amounts of high-energy UV radiation. Their presence causes considerable disruption in their vicinity. It was an open question whether that disruption would routinely interfere with the formation of planets like Earth around stars similar the Sun – which would relegate Earth-like planets to the sidelines in such massive clusters, not impossible to form, but very rare. There were plausible arguments that this could be the case.
The observations the astronomers performed record spectra: rainbow-like decompositions of light that allow estimates of the presence of specific molecules in the observed region. To their surprise, Ramírez-Tannus and her colleagues found that, when it comes to the presence of key molecules, at least one of the inner disks in NGC 6357, namely XUE-1, is not fundamentally different from its counterparts in low-mass star-formation regions.
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