When exposed to ultraviolet light, interstellar ice may act more like a liquid than a solid, a new study has found.
Researchers discovered this effect while re-creating the conditions of our early solar system's planet-forming disk in a laboratory environment, revealing how organic chemistry might react to the deep freeze of the system's outer regions and how the seeds of planets accumulate material.
It is well known that water ice and organic chemistry are found in comets and asteroids . Comets coalesced from the primordial materials found in our solar system's pre-planetary disk of dust and gas, called a protoplanetary disk, around 4.6 billion years ago, and asteroids contain interesting chemistry that is currently the focus of NASA's OSIRIS-REx asteroid-sampling mission . [ Photos: Spectacular Comet Views from Earth and Space ]
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