Latest news with #waterice
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
James Webb telescope discovers frozen water around alien star
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. In a milestone discovery, astronomers have announced that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has detected water ice drifting through a dusty ring of debris surrounding a distant, sunlike star. Astronomers have long suspected that water, especially in its frozen form, might be common in the cold, outer reaches of planetary systems beyond our own. That's because in our own solar system, Saturn's moon Enceladus, Jupiter's Ganymede and Europa, and other icy moons are known to contain vast amounts of frozen water. Some of these moons are even thought to harbor subsurface oceans of liquid water, fueling ongoing discussions about their potential to support life. Now, with JWST's confirmation last week, scientists say they can begin exploring how water — a key ingredient for life as we know it — is distributed and transported in other planetary systems. The new discovery centers on a star called HD 181327, located about 155 light-years away, in the constellation Telescopium. At just 23 million years old, HD 181327 is a cosmic infant compared with our 4.6 billion-year-old sun, and it's encircled by a broad, dusty debris disk that is rich in small, early building blocks of planets. "HD 181327 is a very active system," study co-author Christine Chen, a research scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, said in a NASA statement. Frequent collisions between icy bodies in this disk are constantly stirring up fine particles of dusty water ice, which are "perfectly sized for Webb to detect," Chen said. The findings, published May 15 in the journal Nature, suggest these "dirty snowballs" of ice and dust could eventually play a key role in delivering water to future rocky planets that may form over the next few hundred million years. As planets take shape within the disk, comets and other icy bodies could collide with the young worlds and shower them with water — a process thought to have helped seed early Earth with the water that sustains life today. Related: Did the James Webb telescope really find evidence of alien life? Here's the truth about exoplanet K2-18b. RELATED STORIES —Astronomers discover doomed planet shedding a Mount Everest's worth of material every orbit, leaving behind a comet-like tail —James Webb telescope could find signs of life on alien 'hycean' ocean worlds —4 tiny, Earth-like planets found circling 2nd-closest star system to us — and could be visited by future human generations JWST revealed that most of the distant star system's water ice is concentrated in the outer regions of the disk, where temperatures are cold enough for it to remain stable. Closer in, the ice becomes increasingly scarce, likely vaporized by the star's ultraviolet radiation or locked away in larger rocky bodies known as planetesimals, which remain invisible to JWST's infrared instruments. According to the research team, the debris disk around HD 181327 resembles what the Kuiper Belt — the vast, doughnut-shaped region of icy bodies beyond Neptune — likely looked like billions of years ago during the early stages of our solar system's evolution. "What's most striking is that this data looks similar to the telescope's other recent observations of Kuiper Belt objects in our own solar system," Chen said in the statement.
Gizmodo
09-05-2025
- Science
- Gizmodo
NASA Has a Badass Moon Rover but No Way to Get It to the Moon
NASA's VIPER is designed to search for water ice around the Moon's south pole. But instead of exploring the lunar terrain, the fully assembled four-wheeled robot is in storage at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. After canceling its VIPER mission last year, NASA is still searching for alternatives to launch its lunar rover, and the agency just took another step backward in making it happen. NASA canceled a solicitation for partnership proposals it had sent out earlier this year, calling on the private sector to take over its VIPER mission. This week, the agency announced it would explore alternative options to deliver its lunar rover to the Moon. 'We appreciate the efforts of those who proposed to the Lunar Volatiles Science Partnership Announcement for Partnership Proposals call,' Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. 'We look forward to accomplishing future volatiles science with VIPER as we continue NASA's Moon to Mars exploration efforts.' VIPER, or Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, was originally scheduled to launch in 2023. The launch date was first pushed back to 2024 and later to 2025 due to additional schedule and supply chain delays. In July 2024, the space agency decided to cancel the mission altogether, stating that it threatens to disrupt other commercial payload missions to the Moon. At first, NASA's plan was to disassemble the VIPER rover and use its parts for future missions. The decision, however, sparked outrage from the science community over the loss of the lunar explorer. In response, NASA abruptly put together a call for the private sector to take over its robot and send it to the Moon. Space startups, such as Intuitive Machines, stepped up to put together a plan to respond to NASA's request for information. It's unclear why NASA has reversed earlier decision to pursue a private partnership to send VIPER to the Moon. NASA has already spent $450 million developing its VIPER mission, and the agency declared that it wouldn't spend any more money on getting the rover to land on the lunar surface. Without the help of the private sector, NASA's alternatives for VIPER, at no additional cost from its own pocket, seem rather limited. 'The agency will announce a new strategy for VIPER in the future,' NASA wrote in its statement.
South China Morning Post
08-05-2025
- Science
- South China Morning Post
China fires up powerful radar to search for lunar ice that can make or break moon race
Water ice is likely to exist at the moon's south pole, but it would be fragmented, scattered and buried deep beneath the surface, posing significant challenges for detection and extraction, according to a new study by Chinese researchers. Advertisement Using powerful Earth-based instruments, including the world's largest radio telescope and one of the most advanced radar systems, the team estimated that ice made up no more than 6 per cent of the material within the top 10 metres (33 feet) of lunar soil in the region. The ice was thought to exist as metre-sized chunks buried 5-7 metres underground in the moon's most promising 'cold traps', known as permanently shadowed regions. Smaller, isolated patches might also lie near the surface, the team wrote in the latest issue of the Chinese journal, Science Bulletin. 01:57 China's Chang'e-6 mission returns to Earth with first samples from moon's far side China's Chang'e-6 mission returns to Earth with first samples from moon's far side The findings, the researchers wrote, could help in the selection of landing sites for future lunar missions and inform the design of the proposed China-led research base on the moon. Hu Sen, a planetary geochemist at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics in Beijing, called the work 'impressive'. He said that using China's newly built incoherent scatter radar in Sanya (SYISR) alongside the FAST telescope to search for water ice was a 'really creative approach'. While Hu was not involved in the research, he noted that the results aligned with previous impact experiment findings and added new evidence that water ice existed on the moon. Advertisement 'The study also opened a new pathway to investigate water abundances on the moon,' he said. So far, no liquid water has been found on the moon. 'What we do know is that some water is bound within the lunar soil as 'structural water', and some is preserved as ice in cold traps inside permanently shadowed regions,' Hu said on Wednesday.
