Looking for other planets is hard and looking for those with water is even harder. However, in a scientific first, astronomers have discovered water not on a planet, but rather where a planet is about to form.
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00:00 [Music]
00:03 Looking for other planets is hard and looking for those with water is even harder.
00:07 However, in a scientific first, astronomers have discovered water not on a planet,
00:12 but rather where a planet is about to form.
00:15 This image was captured of a star similar to our Sun called HL Tauri.
00:19 It is currently undergoing the process of system formation as we speak.
00:23 Only 450 light years away from our own solar system and surrounding it,
00:27 astronomers say they have found the equivalent of entire oceans of H2O coalescing around the star.
00:33 Even the researchers themselves were extremely surprised to find it, saying about it,
00:37 "I had never imagined that we could capture an image of oceans of water vapor
00:41 in the same region where a planet is likely forming.
00:44 HL Tauri is extremely young, only around a million years old,
00:47 meaning we're getting a front row seat to what happens in the relative moments after a star is formed.
00:52 The water vapor in the star's planet-forming disk region resides only 17 astronomical units away.
00:58 That's around three astronomical units closer than Uranus is to the Sun,
01:02 with the study's authors saying this reveals that the presence of water
01:05 can influence the development in planetary systems,
01:08 just like we believe happened in our own system 4.5 billion years ago.