Creation at Work

Despite its occasional tendency towards exaggeration, I still subscribe to New Scientist's feeds. This is because, every once in a while, they publish articles that are truly amazing. I read one again this morning that stuck with me through the day. In it, David Shiga explores the data recently captured on an infant star (IRAS 4B), only a few hundred thousand years old.

Wreathed deep in a cloud of gas, the star is grabbing that gas with its gravity, and wrapping it around itself in an accretion disc. Like water twisting around a drain, the gas and dust become compressed as they near the star, forming somehow into clumps. These clumps should, in turn, become planets, though the argument is still out on exactly how this happens. Also caught within the pull of the star is a volume of water five times what we have here on Earth. Most of the water takes the form of clumps of ice, but they've detected water vapor as well. The puzzle is that vapor is occurring at distances from the star too far to be explained by stellar radiation. The theory is that the ice is colliding with the accretion disc as it spirals toward the star. Striking with supersonic velocity, the collisions generate energy in the form of heat, enough to turn ice into vapor.

Though David doesn't explore the idea, I couldn't help but think that we're seeing the birth of a new cradle for life -- and that our system must have had a similar beginning.

The new star is only 1000 light years away, just down at the end of the block from us in terms of the vastness of the universe. As such, we have had the ability to observe features on a scale not often afforded. The data, at this point, still requires an artist to visualize. The next few generations of space telescopes should change this, allowing us to actually see these distant worlds, and perhaps even creation at work.