Star Found Shooting Water "Bullets"

Seven hundred and fifty light-years from Earth, a young, sunlike star has been found with jets that blast epic quantities of water into interstellar space, shooting out droplets that move faster than a speeding bullet.

The discovery suggests that protostars may be seeding the universe with water. These stellar embryos shoot jets of material from their north and south poles as their growth is fed by infalling dust that circles the bodies in vast disks.

"If we picture these jets as giant hoses and the water droplets as bullets, the amount shooting out equals a hundred million times the water flowing through the Amazon River every second," said Lars Kristensen, a postdoctoral astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

"We are talking about velocities reaching 200,000 kilometers [124,000 miles] per hour, which is about 80 times faster than bullets flying out of a machine gun," said Kristensen, lead author of the new study detailing the discovery, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Located in the northern constellation Perseus, the protostar is no more than a hundred thousand years old and remains swaddled in a large cloud—gas and dust from which the star was born.

Using an infrared instrument on the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory, researchers were able to peer through the cloud and detect telltale light signatures of hydrogen and oxygen atoms—the building blocks of water—moving on and around the star.

After tracing the paths of these atoms, the team concluded that water forms on the star, where temperatures are a few thousand degrees Celsius. But once the droplets enter the outward-spewing jets of gas, 180,000-degree-Fahrenheit (100,000-degree-Celsius) temperatures blast the water back into gaseous form.

Once the hot gases hit the much cooler surrounding material—at about 5,000 times the distance from the sun to Earth—they decelerate, creating a shock front where the gases cool down rapidly, condense, and reform as water, Kristensen said.

What's really exciting about the discovery is that it appears to be a stellar rite of passage, the researchers say, which may shed new light on the earliest stages of our own sun's life—and how water fits into that picture.

"We are only now beginning to understand that sunlike stars probably all undergo a very energetic phase when they are young," Kristensen said. "It's at this point in their lives when they spew out a lot of high-velocity material—part of which we now know is water."

Like a celestial sprinkler system, the star may be enriching the interstellar medium—thin gases that float in the voids between stars. And because the hydrogen and oxygen in water are key components of the dusty disks in which stars form, such protostar sprinklers may be encouraging the growth of further stars, the study says.

The water-jet phenomenon seen in Perseus is "probably a short-lived phase all protostars go through," Kristensen said.

"But if we have enough of these sprinklers going off throughout the galaxy—this starts to become interesting on many levels."

It is difficult to envision water, H2O, being present at “thousands of degrees” temperature

It definitely cannot. I distinctly remember one of my professors in a physics class mentioning that no molecule that is known to man can survive on the surface of the Sun. The electrons are stipped away at those temperatures and the molecules disassociate into their atomic components.

So you're left with nothing but plasma (another state of matter) on the surface of the Sun. Not all stars are as hot as the Sun, of course, but the one in this article is... well, it's "Sun like," which means it's close enough.

This came up because he was telling us that no spacecraft could ever be constructed that would enable us to "land on," or explore the surface of the Sun, because no molecules can exist there. Our ship and all its instruments, and all the robots on board, would have to be made out of plasma, and it's kind of hard nowadays to image how you could possibly build anything like that. If there is anything that's impossible, that's it.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.