By Ron Cowen
Even as it forms within a cloud of gas and dust, a nascent star develops a doughnut-shaped disk around it. This is the “protoplanetary disk” that might spawn planets. Using an infrared telescope to peer inside a dusty stellar womb 1,000 light-years from Earth, astronomers say that they have found evidence of such a disk in one of its earliest stages of development.
The observations suggest that large amounts of water from the star-making cloud are crashing onto the disk, spurring its growth and providing a source of water that might later be incorporated into planets. If liquefied, the water would fill Earth’s oceans five times over, Dan Watson of the University of Rochester in New York and his colleagues report in the Aug. 30 Nature.