An asteroid rich in water suggests the existence of exoplanets ... - BFMTV.COM

What accredit a little more on the assumption that life is possible elsewhere in our solar system. The discovery for the first time, the remains of a large asteroid rich in water in another stellar system suggests the existence of habitable exoplanets.

Never before had all detected outside our Solar water system and a rocky body-the “two key elements” for a planet to be habitable-, stress researchers in published Thursday in the journal Science European study.

A 170 light-years from Earth

In the study published Thursday, the remnants of an asteroid that had to be at least 90 km in diameter, are in orbit probably other planets around a white dwarf called GD 61 located approximately 170 light-years from Earth (one light year equals 9,460 billion km).
“At this stage of his life all that remains of the rocky body is dust and debris around a dying star, “commented Professor Boris Gänsicke, Department of Physics, University of Warwick, UK, a leading co-author of the study.
” But this cemetery global is a rich source of information, “he says:”. these residues contain chemical cues revealing the existence of this ancient rich rocky asteroid water “

In its previous life, GD 61 was a little bigger than our Sun Star

These astrophysicists also detected in the debris, magnesium, silicon, iron and oxygen, which are the key ingredients of rocks.
The rocky planets like Earth formed by aggregation of asteroids and “the fact of finding so much water in such a celestial body size means that the materials forming habitable planets and such planets themselves have existed or still exist in the GD star system 61 and probably in many other similar systems, “notes Jay Farihi, an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge, the main author of this discovery.
The asteroid was perhaps a dwarf planet, was formed in 26% water, a proportion similar to Ceres in our solar system. In comparison, the Earth is very dry because the water is only 0.02% of its mass. As Ceres, water should be in the form of ice under the surface of the asteroid.
In its previous life, GD 61 was a little bigger than our sun star, which in several billion years suffer the same fate.
According to the astronomers, GD 61 has finally exhausted its fuel there 200 million years to become a white dwarf. Part of its planetary system survived, but not asteroids and dwarf planets, which orbit is then much closer to the dying star, where they were destroyed by its gravitational force.