Water is one of the building blocks of life, and without it, we would not exist. While it’s easy to find water on Earth, in space, it’s a different matter. Now scientists are turning to NASA’s Webb telescope to help them In the search for interstellar water. This will help them gain a much better understanding as to the origin and evolution of water and some of these other possibly habitable planets.





A molecular cloud consists of interstellar gas and dust made up of various molecules. They hold the majority of the Universe’s water and act as a nursery for newborn planets and stars. Inside these molecular clouds, hydrogen atoms bond with oxygen to form water, while carbon links with hydrogen to create methane, and nitrogen joins hydrogen to make ammonia. All of these molecules end up sticking to the tiny dust specks and get swept up by evolving planets delivering essential materials needed for harboring life as we know it.

“If we can understand the chemical complexity of these ices in the molecular cloud, and how they evolve during the formation of a star and its planets, then we can assess whether the building blocks of life should exist in every star system,” said Melissa McClure of the Universiteit van Amsterdam.





To try and better understand these processes experts will examine a nearby star-forming region to see which ices are present and where. “We plan to use a variety of Webb’s instrument modes and capabilities, not only to investigate this one region, but also to learn how best to study cosmic ices with Webb,” said one of the investigators on the project, Klaus Pontoppidan of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI).

The team is being led by McClure and is planning to start its investigations with the Chameleon Complex as their first target. “This region has a bit of everything we’re looking for,” said Pontoppidan. Using Webb’s infrared detectors, the team will be able to look behind the cloud to view the stars located there. They’ll also look at stars located in the cloud. Another place the astronomers are planning to investigate is in the birthplaces of planets.

Once the data has been gathered from Webb’s observations, experiments will need to be carried out down here on Earth to make sense of it all. By looking at the spectral lines produced by Webb’s spectrograph astronomers can identify the individual molecule or group of molecules that created the absorption lines.





“Laboratory studies will help address two key questions. The first is what molecules are present. But just as important, we’ll look at how the ices got there. How did they form? What we find with Webb will help inform our models and allow us to understand the mechanisms for ice formation at very low temperatures,” explains one of the investigators on the project, Karin Oberg of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “It will take years to mine the data that comes out of Webb fully.” But, at least we’ve made at the start.

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