An international team of astronomers from Italy, Germany, Belgium and other countries has discovered huge amounts of water in a disk of gas and dust that forms a planet in the constellation Taurus, 450 light-years from Earth. According to expert estimates, the material cloud contains enough moisture to fill all of the Earth’s oceans three times over. The study was published in the scientific journal magazine Nature Astronomy (NatAstro).
According to scientists, they have managed to map the distribution of water in a stable protoplanetary disk for the first time. The discovery was made using the Atacama Large Millimeter Wave Array, a radio telescope complex located in Chile.
“I never thought that we could image oceans of water vapor in the same region where planets are likely to form,” said study leader Stefano Facchini, an astronomer at the University of Milan.
The results of the research allowed astronomers to better understand planet formation processes and the role of water in shaping their chemical composition.
Earlier astronomers reduced Search area for the Solar System’s mysterious Planet Nine.