Where it is: 26,000 light-years from Earth
This mesmerizing image may look pretty, but it captures a hostile environment: the turbulent region surrounding a dying star close to our galaxy's central black hole.
Although astronomers have detected water near other stars before, this is the first time it's been found this close to the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, known as Sagittarius A*.
"The detection of water is especially exciting because it shows that molecular material can survive in an environment dominated by intense radiation," study co-author Macarena Garcia Marin, a researcher at the European Space Agency, said in a statement.
How the image was captured
"This is the first time a continuous mid-infrared spectrum has been collected for this star, allowing us to detect the features from the silicate dust and uncover the star's true chemical identity," said Garcia Marin, who is also the principal investigator of the Mid-Infrared Characterization of Nearby Iconic galaxy Centers (MICONIC) program.
This image shows the location of the star IRS 3 (Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, F. Peißker, J. Lu, F. Yusef-Zadeh, N. B. Sabha, C. Chan)
IRS 3 is no ordinary star — it belongs to a class of aging stars living in what astronomers call the asymptotic giant branch phase. In this late-life stage, stars are large and have relatively cool temperatures, and high luminosity. They blow off layers of their own material through intense stellar winds, and that castoff material seeds the universe with cosmic dust.
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Digging into the mid-infrared data, the team found clear signs of oxygen-rich dust surrounding IRS 3. This finding overturns an earlier result that had classified IRS 3 as carbon-rich based on the shape of its dust envelope. Instead, the analysis revealed two strong infrared signatures of silicate dust composed of silicon and oxygen — a telltale signature of an oxygen-rich chemistry.
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