Pristine ices in a planet-forming disk revealed by heavy water

Water is essential to our understanding of the planet-formation process and habitability on Earth. Although trace amounts of water are seen across all phases of star and planet formation, the bulk of the water reservoir often goes undetected, hiding crucial parts of its journey from giant molecular clouds to planets. This raises the question of whether water molecules in comets and (exo-)planets is largely inherited from the interstellar medium or whether the water molecules are destroyed and then reformed in the disk. Water isotopologue ratios involving doubly deuterated water (D2O) are a sensitive tracer to answer this question. Here we present strong evidence of inheritance through an enhancement of D2O in the outbursting V883 Ori disk. The high D2O/H2O ratio of (3.2 ± 1.2) × 10−5 is consistent with values seen in protostellar envelopes and a comet and is 2 orders of magnitude higher than expected if water is reprocessed. The high deuteration of the heaviest isotopologues D2O/HDO = (2.3 ± 1.0) × HDO/H2O further establishes the inheritance of water. We conclude that water ice in disks originates from the earliest phases of star formation, providing the missing link between cold dark clouds and (exo-)comets.