▲ 9 r/space
The ice features seen around the protostar IRAS 15398–3359 do not directly reflect the true chemical composition, because the observed signal is strongly altered by Radiative Transfer effects.
Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27133
- Here, Radiative Transfer explains how light changes as it moves through gas, dust, and ice around a protostar.
- Researchers calculated the freeze-out temperature at which a gas molecule will stick to dust grains as ice or evaporate back into gas in a space. They utilized the Beer-Lambert Law to derive the optical depth of ice species. They used the column density ratio to estimate the relative abundance of different ices from the observed absorption. Here the amount of CO₂ ice relative to water ice is much higher than previously estimated.
u/LK_111 — 10 days ago