HL Tauri is a part of one of the largest and closest star-forming regions to Earth.
In a major breakthrough, scientists have found large amounts of water vapour in a disk of dust circling a baby star. According to space.com, the infant star is filled with enough water to fill Earth's oceans three times over. The discovery is important in astronomers' quest to find signs of life in planets other than Earth. The water was found in the form of vapour locked up in gas and dust within the disk surrounding the sun-like star HL Tauri, located 450 light years away from Earth in the constellation Taurus.
The research detailing the process has been published in Nature Astronomy.
The discovery was made using the Atacama Large Millimetre/ sub-millimetre Array (ALMA), which helped scientists zoom in on the water vapour.
"I had never imagined that we could capture an image of oceans of water vapour in the same region where a planet is likely forming," Stefano Facchini, the lead researcher and an astronomer at the University of Milan, said in a statement.
"Our results show how the presence of water may influence the development of a planetary system, just like it did some 4.5 billion years ago in our own solar system," the statement further said.
Researchers have always wondered how Earth got its water, a key element needed to form and sustain life. Some studies suggest it came from comets and asteroids. Others suggest water was present when Earth was formed.
This discovery will help them understand how water came to HL Tauri. Science Alert said it is less than a million years old, and surrounded by a broad, cool, stable disk.
HL Tauri is a part of one of the largest and closest star-forming regions to Earth called the Taurus Molecular cloud. ALMA's sensitivity allowed astronomers to determine the distribution of water in different regions of the HL Tauri disk.