From NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, Pasadena:
Astronomers Find Largest, Most Distant Reservoir of Water
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 http://www.jpl.nasa.gov .
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Finally, a solution to California’s chronic water problems! 🙂
Is it missing any heat?
Q: “What’s a guy gotta do, to get a drink around here?”
A: “Er…ahhh….. Skim the event horizon of a black hole!”
As W. C. Fields was wont to quip:
“I stumbled across a case of Brandy once…And I’ve been stumbling ever since!”
They stumbled into a whopper here!
How much water is that in SI units? You know… Olympic-sized… oh, never mind. ;o)
.
.
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Pretty cool. The question in my mind is, how much water is there in the universe? Is it really all that rare?
Watch for a whole new Sci Fi Series exploring a liquid, torus-shaped planet the size of a galaxy. To bad about the low density — perhaps gravity gives it a ring-shaped core that is much denser and warmer, even liquid.
Rubbish, typical NASA trying to push the black hole theory of Quasars. It isnt 12 billon lightyears away they couldnt analyse it that far. Its MASS is YOUNGER therefore the ifrared is REDSHIFTED as younger material emits longer wavelengths. Therfore the distance is NOT at the so called redshift distance. Quasars are ejected from galaxies with quantized redshift proven by H Arp and G Burbige. The universe doesnt allow blackholes only super compact objects. Quasars are protogalaxies this has been observed.
The artist must be an adherent of plasma physics. That is a typical nice z-pinch arrangement he slipped in.
which harbors a black hole 20 billion times more massive than the sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion suns.
Seems someone likes large numbers. Maybe it looks impressive on a grant request.
“12 billion light-years away”
I wonder, is it even still there, if we are seeing it as it was 12 billion years ago? Just a thought.
I want to see a debate between three top scientists from the standard theory and three from the Plasma Universe theory. Both teams have a month to prep and the debate will be moderated by someone who’s skeptical of everything.
Electrozark(tm) seat cushions will keep the debate civil and the ad-homs to a bare minimum.
I’ll bring the popcorn. 😉
Wow, that picture is a-w-e-s-o-m-e. Too bad they didn’t note the volume in Californias. 😉
“Watch for a whole new Sci Fi Series exploring a liquid, torus-shaped planet the size of a galaxy. To bad about the low density — perhaps gravity gives it a ring-shaped core that is much denser and warmer, even liquid.”
Larry Niven wrote two novels set in a similar environment: a gas torus around a neutron star. The were mostly sociological fiction, dealing with the descendents of an exploration mission that got stuck, but his descriptions of plausible flora and fauna are interesting. The Integral Trees and the sequel The Smoke Ring have been recently released in a single trade paper volume. (http://www.amazon.com/Integral-Trees-Smoke-Ring/dp/0345460367)
David Falkner,
I believe the correct metric is in Olympic-sized swimming pools.☺
“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.”
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Why is this written in real time, when we are seeing the light emitted 12 billion years ago ?
Anything that was going to happen, already has.
We are just too far away to see the results.
Cool. So, how much of the world’s dwindling financial resources should we allocate to this study?
I was going to warn about the electric universe acolytes trolling this post, but it looks like I am too late.
ClimateForAll says:
July 22, 2011 at 7:20 pm
I was going to warn about the electric universe acolytes trolling this post, but it looks like I am too late.
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Nope, you are the first.
Warning, how ?
Of course there is water in space. Of course there is lots of it. There is a whole universe out there.
I wish we knew more about the water, and the creatures in our oceans here. I was brought up on the allure of space, and it has left me empty and now it bores me.
The ocean is more interesting every day.
@u.k.(us)
I can’t warn of EU trolls commenting here, because it had already begun?
Maybe when e-pulp like, ‘The Thoth – A Catastrophic Newsletter’ quits publishing works of religious fiction and passing it of as science, I might listen.
Until then, I doubt I’ll ever take the E.U. religion seriously.
If you are not familiar with that newsletter, maybe you should go catch up on how the leaders of the Electric Universe Theory view themselves and what they believe in.
If you are already familiar with their works, then your comment is nothing more than bait.
Either way, my point was to warn others before, not after.
But since you asked, I told.
-End of Transmission-
The graphic makes me wonder how a black hole has some directionality.
Wouldn’t all radiation expelled be omni-directional rather than bi-directional as indicated?
The picture reminds me of this fact:
The One who builds His upper chambers in the heavens
And has founded His vaulted dome over the earth,
He who calls for the waters of the sea
And pours them out on the face of the earth,
The LORD is His name.
Thank you for sharing the beautiful picture, it inspires to me to believe!
I imagine it like a mirage on the horizon,
by the time you get to it, it won’t be there anymore.
“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.”
So?
If it was whiskey… now, that would be something!
12 billion light years away, so this happened 7.5 billion years before the earth was born
“…produces as much energy as a thousand trillion suns.”
Big number! It begins to approach the debt ceiling rise for which obama lusts.
Uh, “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.” So frozen water occupies 1/4,000 the space of non-frozen water? And this water is in a space that is -53F or -63C,but is greater than the Milky Way because it is not frozen?
Anyone care to translate this PR from Gibberish?