A vast, frozen fog of interstellar ice has been charted across expanses of the Milky Way, poised to supply water to newborn worlds.
Reaching hundreds of light-years in length, the icy clouds drape two of the galaxy’s active star-forming regions, astronomer Gary Melnick and colleagues report in the April 20 Astrophysical Journal. The findings paint the broadest picture thus far of interstellar ice’s distribution, and seem to confirm predictions that water, a key ingredient for life on Earth, occurs across huge areas of interstellar space, says Melnick, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
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