An international team of astronomers has found evidence of ice and comets orbiting a nearby star much like the Sun, study of which could shed light on how our Solar System developed.
The discovery was made possible by analysing data from the Large Millimetre/submillimenter Array, or ALMA, a cutting-edge telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert used to study the light from some of the coldest objects in the Universe.
The experts from Cambridge University detected very low levels of carbon monoxide around the star in question, an amount that is commensurate with comets in our Solar System.
The results constitute the "first step" in establishing the properties of the clouds of comets around Sun-like stars just after their birth, the university said in a statement.
Comets are basically "dirty snowballs" of ice and rock that sometimes develop a tail of dust when some of the ice evaporates, which usually occurs when they move closer to the Sun on their highly elliptical orbits and heat up.
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The star being studied is called HD181327, which has a mass 30 per cent greater than the Sun and is located 160 light years away in the constellation Pintor. Although it may have planets orbiting it, they cannot be detected with current telescope technology.
It is a young star, just 23 million years old, according to scientists' estimates, compared with our Sun's age of 4.6 billion years.
To infer the possible presence of comets, ALMA researchers looked for - and found - signatures of gas including carbon monoxide, since active young solar systems have a ring of dust and much free gas whirling through them. Up to now, these gas signatures have only been found in a few stars, all of them much heavier than our Sun.
