A fledgling solar system
It’s a gorgeous image, of creation itself - the formation of a new solar system. I didn’t just decide to talk about this because it goes with my colour scheme, or my theme, but rather because it’s a fascinating subject. By gazing into the heavens and watching creation unfold in new systems, we can learn more about how our world came to be, and discover the forces of nature that come together to bring about order from chaos, to form small islands of stability amidst the entropy of the cosmos.
Our own sun is a third generation star and was created approximately 4.6 billion years ago. Back then the galaxy itself had already been around for about 4.5 billion years. It is believed that a nearby supernova exploded and triggered the collapse of nebulous material which then condensed into our sun. This cloud of interstellar gas, ice and dust was spinning, and so some of it fell towards the center, while some of it formed a flat disc spinning around the sun. From this disc thick clumps formed, and became the seeds of planets which gathered up all the extra matter, growing larger as they swept around the sun. The cooled and knocked about a bit, creating the great belts and clouds of rubble around the solar system, and then eventually settled down. So that’s the long and the short of it, now for the news.
NASA released news that their Spitzer Space Telescope has observed a fledgling solar system, and discovered deep within it a large volume of water vapour. There is in fact enough to fill the Earth’s oceans five times. It seems that the water vapour starts off as ice in as a cloud that surrounds the embryonic star.
Ice, which sits around the system, falls toward the center of the cloud vapourises as it nears the dusty pre-planetary disk circling the stellar embryo (which is depicted above as the doughnut-shaped cloud).
Planets could form that have some of this water locked away inside them, which would later reemerge and form oceans. So there could be pale blue dots, around that star someday. But in the meantime, we’re now a little bit closer to discovering the haunting mystery of our own origins.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The star is called NGC 1333-IRAS 4B
