NASA’s James Webb Telescope Just Found Frozen Water Around Another Star

Water ice is a crucial building block of planetary systems. We've found plenty of it in our own Solar System, in places like Europa, Mars, and wayward comets, but we've never made a definitive detection of frozen water around other stars. Plenty of water vapor, yes, but no (d)ice. But that just changed. Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, a team of astronomers have confirmed the presence of water ice in a debris disk encircling a young, Sun-like star just 155 light years away. And tantalizingly, it's the same kind of ice found in our own system. "Webb unambiguously detected not just water ice, but crystalline water ice, which is also found in locations like Saturn's rings and icy bodies in our Solar System's Kuiper Belt," said Chen Xie, an assistant research scientist at Johns Hopkins University and lead author of a new study published in the journal Nature, in a statement about the work. We tend to think of water in biological terms — as a key ingredient for life. But frozen c ... Read full article.