Water Surrounding a Young Earth-like Star

In the June 13 National Geographic News feed, an article was posted concerning the observation of vast amounts of water surrounding a young sun-like star only 750 light years from Earth. Quotations below are from one of the authors of a paper which has been accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

“The discovery suggests that proto-stars 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.”

Some water from the star is being jetted from the poles at high velocities where the high temperature dissociates the water molecules, but when the hydrogen and oxygen hit the much cooler surrounding material … they decelerate, creating a shock front where the gases cool down rapidly, condense and reform as water, Lars Kristensen, a postdoctoral astronomer at Leiden University, said.

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.”

“What is really exciting about the discoveryis 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 sun-like stars probably all undergo a very energetic phase when they are young Kristensen said. It’s a this point in their lives when they spew out a lot of high velocity material – part of which we know is water.”

The Cyclic Catastrophism View

Astronomers still do not understand that water was the primary molecule involved in the creation of the giant planets, the initial stage in the creation of the solar system. This is only logical, since hydrogen and oxygen (excluding helium) are the most abundant elements present in the system. Is the water seen as jets from the poles of the proto-star the only water present? Of course not. The vast clouds surrounding it are also primarily water.

Modern astronomer’s fail to recognize the current great abundance of oxygen in our solar system due to the mistaken assumptionthat the giant planets are gaseous, comprising 99% hydrogen. I have explained in a number of posts (Saturn’s Rings, Heavy Elements in the Solar System, Small Ruminations About Giant Planets, The Origin of the Solar System, The Enduring mysteries of the solar system, and Dark Matter and the Giant Planets) that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are solid, comprising methane gas hydrates – that are primarily water by weight. Just as in this proto-star, dust grains and volatile elements were all pushed outward to the radius of Jupiter and beyond. The dust grain surfaces catalyzed the formation of molecules O2, H2, N2, and ices (plus CH4) formed on them at the snow belt. Accretion of the solar system began by the formation of snowflakes which symbiotically incorporated most of the heavy elements into Jupiter. As the pressure within the frozen giant planets increased in the presence of vast amounts of methane, solid gas hydrates naturally formed. Their cage-like structure obviously prevented compression and facilitated the incorporation of the heavy elements in the nascent solar system into Jupiter, accounting for its higher average density.

Although the small amount of the proto-star’s jetting water is over emphasized in the paper, one comment by Kristensen is appropriate “.. If we have enough of these sprinklers going off throughou the galaxy – this starts to become interesting on many levels.”

As I have explained in many other posts, the terrestrial planets each formed much later as the result of a unique high energy impact on Jupiter, the methane gas hydrate surface of which is perfect for the initiation of an enormous fusion reaction. The impacts resulted in the rebound of enormous plasma clouds, perhaps a thousand times the volume of Jupiter itself, which contracted rapidly as they rebounded into the inner solar system. The condensation of the heavy elements explains the rapid collection of iron in their cores, while the far more vast amount of water blasted into the inner solar system, was accumulated on their surfaces once the proto-planets cooled. Venus is currently in this intermediate period, when water is being captured in the atmospher, but cannot yet exist of the hot surface. This same water has been imaged by Louis Frank as ten million house-sized comets comets falling into the Earth’s atmosphere every year.

Understanding this entire process makes clear that we have no way to determine the age of the solar system or of the Sun. The 4.7 billion year old rocks floating around the solar system were all blasted out of Mars, when it still had its solid iron core, Mercury, in the last 6,000 years. But there is no way of knowing how long after the formation of the giant planets that Mars, and its former solid core, Mercury, formed. As a corollary, the amount of oxygen estimated to be in the sun and even its estimated lifetime are unknown because it has sunk far below the surface.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio. (William Shakespeare)