Astronomers have discovered the shattered remains of an asteroid that had a large amount of water orbiting a dead star, or white dwarf, according to BBC News.
Star GD 61 and its planetary system had the potential to contain Earth-like exoplanets. The star was located about 150 light years away.
This marks the first time that both a rocky surface and water have been found together beyond our own solar system. Both are "key ingredients for habitable planets, according to BBC News.
Though it may not seem like it, Earth is mainly a dry planet, with just 0.02 percent of its mass as surface water, and oceans formed long after the planet did. The discovery shows that the same water "delivery system" could have taken place in this dying star's solar system as well.
After being analyzed, the asteroid is composed of 26 percent of water mass, similar to Ceres, which is the biggest asteroid in the main belt of our solar system, according to BBC News.
"The finding of water in a large asteroid means the building blocks of habitable planets existed, and maybe still exist, in the GD 61 system, and likely also around substantial number of similar parent stars," said the study's lead author Jay Farihi, from Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy.
Astronomers at the Universities of Cambridge and Warwick said this is the first "reliable evidence" for water-rich, rocky planetary material in any extrasolar planetary system, according to BBC News.
The new research findings were discovered thanks to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the study was reported today in the journal Science.
"These water-rich building blocks, and the terrestrial planets they build, may in fact be common, a system cannot create things as big as asteroids and avoid building planets, and GD 61 had the ingredients to deliver lots of water to their surfaces," Farihi said.
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