Stellar Graveyard Shows Signs of Possible (Past) Life | Science/AAAS | News: "n GD 61’s pollution, Farihi and his colleagues noticed a curious abundance of oxygen. Their first thought was that the original asteroid must have been encrusted with carbon dioxide in the form of dry ice. Trouble is, there was no carbon anywhere to be found around GD 61. So in order to account for the extra oxygen, “the only chemically viable substance left is water,” Farihi says."
ater-rich asteroids are considered to be important for the formation of habitable planets, crashing into them and supplying them with life-giving liquid water. Although “we certainly can’t rewind the clock completely” to discover what GD 61’s original solar system looked like, Farihi says, the discovery of the asteroid reveals “the building blocks of Earth-like planets were there.” In the future, he hopes to look at the system with a powerful telescope like the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array radio array in Chile to see if any of the original planets survived the death of their star, or whether anything remains of the asteroid belt where the water-rich planetesimal was born.
Finding a water-rich asteroid near a white dwarf bolsters the long-shot idea that life might rise again around these dead stars, says John Debes, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, who wasn’t involved in the research. After their stars’ violent deaths, white dwarfs remain remarkably stable for billions more years, which would mean “they’d actually be really good places to live,” Debes says. The problem, however, is that a planet would have to be extremely close to a dim white dwarf to be warm enough to support life
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very exciting news The prevalence of water in asteroids is a promising sign- and portends well for future space programs. My super nerdiness is remembering several Stephen Baxter novels - where asteroid mining sustains off world colonies :)
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