Life in the water/snow line of a protoplanetary accretion disc?

So I was reading this article recently, titled Stellar Outburst Brings Water Snow Line into View: http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1626. In short it's about a protoplanetary accretion disc around a young star. The closer the disc is to the star the hotter it gets. But on the farther side of the disc it can get cold enough for water/snow to collect. See the article for details.

First of all, holy wow! Secondly, that gave me an idea for something similar to Larry Niven's Smoke Ring from his Integral Trees books.

There must be an area in the accretion disc where the water/snow line is warm enough for the water to remain liquid, just between too hot and too cold. I know I'm stretching here and it would take all kinds of handwave. The speed the disc is spinning at is probably too great to allow for it; The disc itself is probably too turbulent; All the stuff in it probably mixes up chaotically; It all gets pulled into the star; Radiation, etc. etc.

But in the article it reads that the outer edge of the disc (the water/snow line) was as far away from its star as Pluto is from our sun. At that distance maybe the conditions of all that turbulence are lessened. Move that area in closer to the star, say to the goldilocks zone, and you might get a water/snow "zone/ring" that is warm enough and stable enough for the conditions I'm looking for.

Could that band be large enough that creatures who could breathe water could live and swim around in it?

Sub question: What with all that stuff in the disc being the matter that later creates life could life originate in that area?

posted about 6 years ago

Len‭

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