Remains of an aqueous asteroid point to habitable exoplanets - 20minutos.es

class=”text”> The asteroid Vesta, in an image file. (NASA)

Astronomers have found the shattered remains of an asteroid that contains large amounts of water orbiting a star exhausted or a white dwarf. This suggests that the star GD 61 and its planetary system, located about 150 light years away and, at the end of his life, had potential to contain Earth-like exoplanets , the authors of the discovery , published in the journal ‘Science’.

This is the first time I found water and a rocky surface, two “key components” for habitable planets , together beyond our solar system. The planet Earth is essentially a “dry”, with only 0.02% of its mass with surface water as the oceans came long after it was formed, most likely when the water-rich asteroids in the solar system crashed against our planet.

The new discovery shows that a ‘delivery system’ of the same water could have occurred in the distant dying solar system star, as recent evidence suggests that contain a similar type rich water whose first asteroid would have brought water to Earth. The asteroid analyzed has a 26% mass of water , very similar to Ceres, the largest asteroid in the main belt of our solar system. Both are much richer in water compared to the Earth.

class=”quote_new”> GD 61 had the ingredients to deliver a lot of water to their surfaces The astronomers from the universities of Cambridge and Warwick, in the UK, who led the research, said that is the first “trust test” of water in rock material planetarium at any extrasolar planetary system. These scientists describe it as a “look ahead” as, to 6,000 million years ago, when astronomers study the remains alien to rock around our sun burn can reach the same conclusion, that terrestrial planets once surrounded our star.

new research results were obtained using the Hubble Space Telescope for NASA. All rocky planets are formed by the accumulation of asteroids , growing to full size, so that the asteroids are essentially the “building blocks” of the planets.

“The discovery of water in a large asteroid means that the building blocks for habitable planets exist, and perhaps still exist, in the GD system 61, and is likely to also around a large number of similar parent stars, “said lead author Jay Farihi, Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge.

“These water-rich components that build terrestrial planets may in fact be common, as a system can not create something as big as asteroids and avoid building planets. GD 61 had the ingredients to provide plenty of water to their surfaces “, stressed Farihi said. “Our results demonstrate that there was definitely possible existence of habitable planets in the system of exoplanets,” he added.

Researchers say

detected water probably came from a minor planet of less than 90 kilometers in diameter , but perhaps much larger, that once orbited the star GD 61 before to become a white dwarf about 200 million years. Previous and current astronomical observations have measured the size and density of exoplanets, but not its composition, because the conventional work focuses on planets orbiting stars living.

But the only way to see what a distant planet is disarmed, the researchers say, and nature does it for us in a white dwarf system dying through their extreme gravity, absorbing and destroying the material surrounding. These wastes “pollute” the atmosphere of the white dwarf can be analyzed chemically using techniques powerful spectrograph “distill the asteroid, the core and the rest”, experts say.