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Published October 21, 2011 | public
Journal Article

Detection of the Water Reservoir in a Forming Planetary System

Abstract

Icy bodies may have delivered the oceans to the early Earth, yet little is known about water in the ice-dominated regions of extrasolar planet-forming disks. The Heterodyne Instrument for the Far-Infrared on board the Herschel Space Observatory has detected emission lines from both spin isomers of cold water vapor from the disk around the young star TW Hydrae. This water vapor likely originates from ice-coated solids near the disk surface, hinting at a water ice reservoir equivalent to several thousand Earth oceans in mass. The water's ortho-to-para ratio falls well below that of solar system comets, suggesting that comets contain heterogeneous ice mixtures collected across the entire solar nebula during the early stages of planetary birth.

Additional Information

© 2011 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Received for publication 25 May 2011. Accepted for publication 20 September 2011. Herschel is a European Space Agency space observatory with science instruments provided by European-led principal investigator consortia and with important participation from NASA. This work was partially supported by Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek grant 639.042.404, NSF grant 0707777, and, as part of the NASA Herschel HIFI guaranteed time program, NASA. The data presented here are archived at the Herschel Science Archive, http://archives.esac.esa.int/hda/ui, under OBSID 1342198337 and 1342201585

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 24, 2023