For the first time, a water snow line was snapped drifting around a young star. In most young stars, the conditions around them tend to transform gas directly to snow and ice without the intermediate liquid phase. This region is known as the water snow line.
The star, called V883 Orionis, is about 1,350 light-years away, in the Orion Nebula Cluster. It underwent a huge flare pushing "the water snow line around its protoplanetary disk, where planets are formed, outwards." Hence, this sight was able to be viewed by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).
"Normally, that boundary huddles too close to the star for astronomers to see it, but this particular star had a sudden burst of brightness that superheated its disk, obliterating ice further out than usual," according to space.
The sight was helpful for scientists to figure out that the forming planet is within the water snow line, in which the liquid is seen to be gas. It forms a planet like the rocky earth. On the other hand, when planets are formed outside the water snow line, in which the liquid is seen to be ice, it turns into huge gas planets, such as Jupiter.
So the water snow line is an interesting phase in evolution. The telescopic view thus has more advantages than believed.
The ALMA observations came as a surprise to us," said Lucas Cieza, an astronomer at Diego Portales University in Chile and the lead author of the new work. "Our observations were designed to image disk fragmentation, which is one of the proposed mechanisms for the formation of giant planets."
However, scientists did not observe fragmentation. They just saw the "unexpected ring in the disk" that has helped them to arrive at a number of exciting conclusions.
YouTube/European Southern Observatory
