Water D/H in 3I/ATLAS as a probe of formation conditions in another planetary system

Le résumé fourni par la source

Water reservoirs in the Solar System exhibit a deuterium enrichment that links back to the physical environment at the time of stellar birth. Gas-phase and ice-grain deuterium enrichments occur through chemical processes that operate at low temperatures (<30 K) pointing towards an origin in the prestellar molecular cloud or in the outer parts of the protoplanetary disk. However, not all stars are born in environments similar to our Sun, nor do their subsequent evolutionary histories follow the same path. These environmental differences can be traced by the water deuterium-to-hydrogen (D/H) ratio. Here we use ALMA observations of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS to constrain the water D/H ratio in extrasolar cometary material. With a water D/H value of $${[{\rm{D}}/{\rm{H}}]}_{{{\rm{H}}}_{2}{\rm{O}}} > 6.6\times 1{0}^{-3}$$ , 3I/ATLAS shows a deuterium enrichment exceeding Earth’s ocean value by more than a factor of about 40 and typical Solar System cometary values by more than a factor of about 30. The elevated deuterium enrichment points to water that formed under colder, less irradiated conditions and from less thermally processed material, consistent with an origin in a planetary system that formed under different physical and chemical conditions than our own. ALMA observations of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS provide a limit on the deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio in water. This ratio is a sensitive probe of temperature, suggesting that comet 3I formed in an ultracold environment with minimal thermal processing in its home system.

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