• Astronomers Find Largest, Most Distant Reservoir of Water
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[quote]Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. The water, equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world's ocean, surrounds a huge, feeding black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billion light-years away. "The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it's producing this huge mass of water," said Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times." Bradford leads one of the teams that made the discovery. His team's research is partially funded by NASA and appears in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. A quasar is powered by an enormous black hole that steadily consumes a surrounding disk of gas and dust. As it eats, the quasar spews out huge amounts of energy. Both groups of astronomers studied a particular quasar called APM 08279+5255, which harbors a black hole 20 billion times more massive than the sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion suns. Astronomers expected water vapor to be present even in the early, distant universe, but had not detected it this far away before. There's water vapor in the Milky Way, although the total amount is 4,000 times less than in the quasar, because most of the Milky Way’s water is frozen in ice. Water vapor is an important trace gas that reveals the nature of the quasar. In this particular quasar, the water vapor is distributed around the black hole in a gaseous region spanning hundreds of light-years in size (a light-year is about six trillion miles). Its presence indicates that the quasar is bathing the gas in X-rays and infrared radiation, and that the gas is unusually warm and dense by astronomical standards. Although the gas is at a chilly minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius) and is 300 trillion times less dense than Earth's atmosphere, it's still five times hotter and 10 to 100 times denser than what's typical in galaxies like the Milky Way. Measurements of the water vapor and of other molecules, such as carbon monoxide, suggest there is enough gas to feed the black hole until it grows to about six times its size. Whether this will happen is not clear, the astronomers say, since some of the gas may end up condensing into stars or might be ejected from the quasar. Bradford's team made their observations starting in 2008, using an instrument called "Z-Spec" at the California Institute of Technology’s Submillimeter Observatory, a 33-foot (10-meter) telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Follow-up observations were made with the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA), an array of radio dishes in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California. The second group, led by Dariusz Lis, senior research associate in physics at Caltech and deputy director of the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory, used the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps to find water. In 2010, Lis's team serendipitously detected water in APM 8279+5255, observing one spectral signature. Bradford's team was able to get more information about the water, including its enormous mass, because they detected several spectral signatures of the water. Other authors on the Bradford paper, "The water vapor spectrum of APM 08279+5255," include Hien Nguyen, Jamie Bock, Jonas Zmuidzinas and Bret Naylor of JPL; Alberto Bolatto of the University of Maryland, College Park; Phillip Maloney, Jason Glenn and Julia Kamenetzky of the University of Colorado, Boulder; James Aguirre, Roxana Lupu and Kimberly Scott of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Hideo Matsuhara of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Japan; and Eric Murphy of the Carnegie Institute of Science, Pasadena. Funding for Z-Spec was provided by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Research Corporation and the partner institutions. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. More information about JPL is online at [url]http://www.jpl.nasa.gov[/url] .[/quote] [img]http://static.latercera.com/20121009/1631775.jpg[/img] forgot the source, here:[url]http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/universe20110722.html[/url]
[quote]A quasar is powered by an enormous black hole that steadily consumes a surrounding disk of gas and dust. As it eats, the quasar spews out huge amounts of energy. Both groups of astronomers studied a particular quasar called APM 08279+5255, which harbors a black hole 20 billion times more massive than the sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion suns.[/quote] My mind...
[quote]20 billion times more massive than the sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion suns[/quote] I can't even begin to imagine something like that.
Well, if the LHC really creates a black hole, all our energy problems will be solved. Atleast for a short time.
who wants to go for a swim?
[quote]which harbors a black hole 20 billion times more massive than the sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion suns.[/quote] mother of fucking god
[QUOTE=DrLuckyLuke;37975542]Well, if the LHC really creates a black hole, all our energy problems will be solved. Atleast for a short time.[/QUOTE] Except for the part where it's never going to make a black hole in the lifetime of the entire Earth, and if it does it'll die in seconds because it'll release energy faster than it can take it in. [editline]9th October 2012[/editline] [QUOTE=salty peanut v2;37975556]who wants to go for a swim?[/QUOTE] Imagine drowning, as you get sucked into a black hole. What a shitty way to die.
What the hell collapsed to make a black hole that big... Or are they talking about the "size" which accounts for the event horizon as well?
[QUOTE=Pierrewithahat;37975560]Except for the part where it's never going to make a black hole in the lifetime of the entire Earth, and if it does it'll die in seconds because it'll release energy faster than it can take it in. [editline]9th October 2012[/editline] Imagine drowning, as you get sucked into a black hole. What a shitty way to die.[/QUOTE] no that would be p rad but probably painful
So a quasar is a black hole's anus?
[QUOTE=Pierrewithahat;37975560]Except for the part where it's never going to make a black hole in the lifetime of the entire Earth, and if it does it'll die in seconds because it'll release energy faster than it can take it in. [editline]9th October 2012[/editline] Imagine drowning, as you get sucked into a black hole. What a shitty way to die.[/QUOTE] technically the black hole wouldn't kill you any faster, it'd just slow everything down so it takes a number of years to drown
[QUOTE=Pierrewithahat;37975560]Except for the part where it's never going to make a black hole in the lifetime of the entire Earth, and if it does it'll die in seconds because it'll release energy faster than it can take it in. [editline]9th October 2012[/editline] Imagine drowning, as you get sucked into a black hole. What a shitty way to die.[/QUOTE] i'm fairly certain time slows down as you approach the center of a black hole, so imagine drowning forever. what a ninja
Water, in some form, could potentially mean a different type of life form.. Right?
[QUOTE=koeniginator;37978403]technically the black hole wouldn't kill you any faster, it'd just slow everything down so it takes a number of years to drown[/QUOTE] ... Except the whole part where a black hole causes your body to string out and rips you apart...
[QUOTE=Mobon1;37978428]i'm fairly certain time slows down as you approach the center of a black hole, so imagine drowning forever. what a ninja[/QUOTE] Time would feel normal for you, but for the outside observer you'd be going slow as fuck.
[quote]20 billion times more massive than the sun[/quote] That's kind of heavy
[QUOTE=SatansSin;37978441]Water, in some form, could potentially mean a different type of life form.. Right?[/QUOTE] Considering it's place in the universe, it could be the watercloud that eventually gave life to our solar system
[QUOTE=Spot of Tea;37978817]Considering it's place in the universe, it could be the watercloud that eventually gave life to our solar system[/QUOTE] That's probably the work of the Oort cloud and a bit of lucky galactic positioning. [editline]9th October 2012[/editline] [QUOTE=plokoon9619;37978320]So a quasar is a black hole's anus?[/QUOTE] A Quasar is a supercharged black hole. The downside (or upside, if you're into that sort of thing) about Quasars is the youngest ones have only been seen 1 billion+ years ago. In other words, they don't exist anymore (largely because there's simply not enough food to keep them going.)
yay universe, did you guys know theres a massive cloud made up of elements that form beer?
Jeez black hole, save some for the whales.
This is new? I thought I saw this thing last year on the NASA website...
So if you're flying a spaceship it could start raining outside? in space?
Now the homeopaths can actually mix their 40x solutions.
[QUOTE=Canary;37983582]So if you're flying a spaceship it could start raining outside? in space?[/QUOTE] I think it'd look more like a snowstorm or blizzard, since it's in space.
Imagine if there was a planet that was just a massive sphere of water. A bubble of water in space.
[QUOTE=OvB;37985750]Imagine if there was a planet that was just a massive sphere of water. A bubble of water in space.[/QUOTE] I had a dream about just that before. There were 2 big orbs of water in space and there were whales swimming around inside of them. It was pretty neat.
[QUOTE=OvB;37985750]Imagine if there was a planet that was just a massive sphere of water. A bubble of water in space.[/QUOTE] I've always thought of different planets like this ever since I could remember. I drew some when I was about 4
if only we had a way to get to that water and tap into the energy we find around the galaxy. [editline]10th October 2012[/editline] we haven't even tapped into our OWN suns true potential yet!
I like to imagine that when a black hole dismembers your body as you're sucked through it, it reassembles you somewhere on the other side of the universe only to die of asphyxiation and hypothermia.
[QUOTE=OvB;37985750]Imagine if there was a planet that was just a massive sphere of water. A bubble of water in space.[/QUOTE] Kamino.
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