2024-03-11 05:00:08
An international team has just revealed the destruction and reformation of a large quantity of water in a protoplanetary disk located at the heart of the Orion Nebula.
This discovery was made possible by an original multidisciplinary approach combining observations of space telescope (A space telescope is a telescope placed beyond the atmosphere. The…) JWST and calculations quantum physics (Quantum physics is the general name for a set of physical theories…). This study, carried out as part of the Early Release program Science (Science (Latin scientia, “knowledge”) is, according to the dictionary…) (ERS) PDRs4All and led by a young researcher, Marion Zannese, doctoral student atUniversité (A university is an establishment of higher education whose objective is…) Paris-Saclay, has just been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Water is essential to life as we know it. On Earth, the majority of the water in our oceans would have been formed well before the birth of the Solar System, in cold regions of interstellar space (-250°C). However, a fraction of this water may have been destroyed and formed again at higher altitudes. temperature (Temperature is a physical quantity measured using a thermometer and…) (100-500 °C) when the Solar System was still just a disk of gas and dust orbiting our young sun.
To understand this mysterious cycle of disappearance and reappearance of water, astronomers turned the James Webb Telescope (JWST) towards “d203-506”, a protoplanetary disk (Stars form from a cloud of gas and dust, the central part of which…) located in the Nebula (A nebula (from the Latin nebula, “cloud”) designates, in astronomy, a…) of Orion, a nursery of planetary systems. THE radiation (Radiation, synonymous with radiation in physics, refers to the process of emission or…) ultraviolet (Ultraviolet (UV) radiation is electromagnetic radiation with a length…) Intense energy produced by massive stars results in the destruction and reformation of water in d203-506, making it a veritable interstellar laboratory.
But how can we demonstrate the formation and destruction of molecules located more than a thousand light years from Earth?
It is a collaboration with experts in dynamic (The word dynamic is often used to designate or qualify that which relates to movement. It…) quantum, participating in the modeling part, which made it possible to meet the challenge.
During the destruction of water (H2O) by ultraviolet, a hydroxyl molecule (OH) is released with a dizzying rotational movement, followed by the emission of photons (In particle physics, the photon is the elementary particle mediating the interaction…) in L’infrared (Infrared radiation (IR) is electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength…) medium that travel to JWST. In total it is estimated that the equivalent of a terrestrial ocean is thus destroyed every month in the young system d203-506.
Right: Animation/Diagram illustrating how the formation and destruction of water could be revealed by JWST observations (credit: M.Zannese).
But the story does not end there. Through a similar near-infrared photon emission mechanism, JWST reveals that hydroxyl is produced in abundance from atomic oxygen by the O+H2 reaction. However, this is precisely a key intermediate in the formation of water since it then reacts with H2 to form water by the OH+H2 reaction. The destruction/formation cycle is complete. Part of the water constituting our oceans could have gone through such a cycle.
Reference:
The article entitled “OH as a probe of the warm water cycle in planet-forming disks” appears in the journal Nature Astronomy, February 23, 2024.
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