It looks like winter is coming to a distant, still forming solar system thanks to the discovery of watery “snowlines.”
Snowlines are a ring of dust and debris where it is cold and far enough away from the host star where water, carbon monoxide, and other compounds condense into solid ice particles. They are a hot topic in the study of planetary formation as it is what may lead to the creation of planets in a system. Other snowlines have been found, such as the CO snowline, but this is the first instance of a water snowline as published in Nature.
The young star V883 Orionis (approximately 1,350 light years from Earth in the Orion Nebula Cluster) underwent a violent outburst, which heated the inner portion of the protoplanetary disk and in turn pushed the snowline out much further than normal. Because of this, astronomers were able to capture it with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) when normally it lies much too close to the star for even ALMA to resolve it.
