The James Webb Space Telescope has found water ice and carbon dioxide ice in the dusty disk around Beta Pictoris, and the mix looks a lot like the comets in our own Solar System.
The result comes from a study in Science led by Sarah Betti, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Her team pointed Webb at the disk to look for ice. They found both kinds. The water ice is glassy, meaning its molecules lack the ordered structure of crystalline ice. It is mixed with carbon dioxide in roughly the same proportions seen in Solar System comets.
Beta Pictoris is a young star, about 20 million years old, sitting roughly 64 light-years from Earth. Planets are still forming in the rubble around it. The researchers say the findings suggest the ingredients for water-rich worlds might be common around young stars.
That is a hedged claim, and it should stay one. This is a single star, though an unusually well-studied one. Its disk was among the first ever imaged, in 1984, and we view it almost exactly edge-on, which makes it a convenient test case for how planetary systems grow.
It is also a debris disk: a ring where dust is constantly replenished by collisions among comets and planetesimals, the small bodies that build planets. Finding comet-like ice there is, in a sense, finding what the building blocks are made of. The open question is whether other young systems, once Webb checks them, turn out to have the same recipe or a different one.