It might seem incongruous to find water ice in the disk of gas and dust surrounding a star. Fire and ice just don't mix. We would never find ice near our Sun. But our Sun is old. About 5 billion years old, with about 5 billion more to go. Some younger stars, of a type called Herbig Ae/Be stars (after American astronomer George Herbig,) are so young that they are surrounded by a circumstellar disk of gas and dust which hasn't been used up by the formation of planets yet. For these types of stars,...
It might seem incongruous to find water ice in the disk of gas and dust surrounding a star. Fire and ice just don't mix. We would never find ice near our Sun. But our Sun is old. About 5 billion years old, with about 5 billion more to go. Some younger stars, of a type called Herbig Ae/Be stars (after American astronomer George Herbig,) are so young that they are surrounded by a circumstellar disk of gas and dust which hasn't been used up by the formation of planets yet. For these types of stars,...
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