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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The concept of 12 billion light years, seems to be a challenge for some to grasp.
Much like the concept of light reaching Earth from the Sun.
Light from our Sun takes 8 minutes to travel to Earth.
If our Sun refused to shine, it would take that long for that phenomena to be observed here on Earth.
Also in that amount of time, our solar system would have traveled 68k miles in its orbit around the Milky Way.
In those same 8 minutes. the Earth would have traveled 9k miles around its orbit of the Sun.
The Milky Way is said to move around the gravitational center of a larger group of galaxies, known as the Local Group. The Milky Way would have moved 12k miles in those same 8 minutes.
Before one can grasp the concept of Light Years, I think it is important to understand what our perspective is, of the viewing of a phenomena, before we can understand the time of the phenomena.
We have come to understand that time is relative.
To give an example, If I was somehow able to step off Earth the moment the Sun refused to shine, and come to a complete stop around the orbit of the Sun, the Milky Way and the LG, in the 8 minutes for the event to reach me, the Earth would have traveled nearly 90k miles.
While I would be covered in complete darkness from the absence of light from the Sun, the light reflecting off the Earth(assuming the Earth and I are equal distance from the Sun), would continue for another half a sec; essentially making the Earth appear to glow without any source of light.
The object which we view over a period of time is no longer where it was, whenever it took place.
If the observer was in an orbit of some kind, then the viewer is no longer where they were, whenever the event took place.
If the observer had never moved at the time that such an event took place, the place in time where the observer might have been would have experienced the event at that time in space, while the space he would have witnessed the event from, wouldn’t haven’t taken place yet.
In addition, the source of the event, would no longer be at the location that the event took place, but be in a completely different place in space altogether.
Lets come back to this image we are receiving from 12 billion light years. The galaxy we are viewing is no longer where it was. The Earth is not where it was 12 billion l.y.’s ago, regardless if the Earth existed at all. The light travelling from that galaxy would have reached this time and this place, according to the laws of science, even if we choose to deny such science.
My point is this: The galaxy in question may not even exist. It may have been ate by a quasar or spun itself into another galaxy for all we know. Who knows, maybe another observer witnessed the destruction of the same galaxy at the same precise moment we discovered the galaxy.
Though we are just now discovering that this galaxy exists, the light travelling from that source has been moving out towards the furthermost regions of the known Universe, shedding it’s secrets, for those that wish to learn from it.
We should be talking about the discovery of another source of water and the implications it brings.
We now have further evidence that water, life giving water, is not just present here on Earth, or on comets(yeah, that’s ice coming off comets, not an electrical discharge.), or on asteroids, or on the moon, but from distant galaxies as well.
The building block of life itself seems to be more prevalent than we had ever imagined.
That’s the real story.
Are there atheist physicists? Didn’t the Higgs boson come from a revelation so how is the search for it not belief in ‘a god which creates’..? Rumours …
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/0425/Higgs-boson-Was-the-God-particle-found
If this bathtub is now 12 billion light years away and the universe has been stretching since its beginning, where did it begin?
Water in space? Pretty soon they’ll be telling me there’s amino acids in meteorites.
;^)
Why is water vapor, H2O, called warm at (-63deg)? The scientists call this (-63) ‘warm’ because of a comparison to the temperatures of the surrounding area. This is why they are measuring with infrared and super infrared, the data is all about temperature differences and relative coldness.
An ESA article about ‘cold clouds and water in space’ can be found here: http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/142/cold-clouds-and-water-in-space
The Plateau de Bure Interferometer, (http://iram.fr/IRAMFR/index.htm) is a ‘powerful but complex’ technique. With a resolution of 0.5 arcsecs, and being able to see an ‘apple at 60 kilometers away’ resolution quality, it is not the same level of difficulty as trying to look at a Quasar, seen near the edge of what scientists say is the end of visible space over 12 billion light years away. Even with this superb level of accuracy, and even if they run the data from an ‘unobscured space telescope’ through the Interferometer computers, the distance is a problem.
For a comparison, the Hubble Space Telescope cannot clearly see the newly found, and smallest moon of Pluto called P4 at a mere distance of a little more than 3 billion miles away.
P4 can almost be seen here:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/pluto-moon.html
A picture showing APM08279+5255 in relative space can be found here.
http://www.perseus.gr/Astro-DSO-QSO-APM08279+5255.htm (good picture)
Any light passing through any water vapor clouds in space would show the telltale signature of water in its spectral signature and all this light from APM 08279+5255 is ‘gravity lensed’. This is already known and it is a problem.
NASA already knows this.
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap980818.html (Partly a mirage?)
“Additional, as yet unseen, lensing galaxies may also be present.” Found here on page 2/18:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/9806/9806171v1.pdf
Remember, they are not measuring an ‘area’, they are measuring a ‘volume’ in deep space by looking at a spectrograph of a sample of light. By ‘deep space’ I mean being at the extreme physical limits of any possible measurement by any device. Light spectra is the only data, and everything which is measurable is derived from this sample of recorded light. No one is going out there to get a glass of space so that we can test it in the lab and see how much water is in it.
The question then is how much water is there in the measured spectral ‘sample’ and how big is the measured volumetric area where this ‘spectrally measured water’ is found? This is not explained.
Throw a glass of water into the air and take a picture of it. Your picture is essentially ‘two-dimensional’. You may choose to include a drop of water to be measured from the photograph or you may choose not to include a drop of water to be measured. What you choose to see and measure in the photograph is not random and what you would choose to include in the picture to be measured effects the final data.
Choosing a drop of water to be measured in the picture and blowing it up in size to fit the ‘guesstimated volume’ of the quasar may not be statistically honest or representative of what is really going on. You can play with the numbers and get a result, but it may not be the truth.
Space is very very big. For comparison of size and distance, when our Sun is made a single ‘speck of dust’, and when it is compared to the next nearest star ‘Alpha Centauri’, also another ‘speck of dust’; it is like a two specks of dust in an otherwise empty vacuum 4.3 miles apart. Spread out the mass of the sun, a speck of dust, within this ‘volume with a radius of 4.3 miles’ and it essentially disappears into the void.
It is all about the details.
What do they mean when they talk of all this water, at APM 08279+5255?
I do not know.
Neither do you.
Neither do they.
“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 does this mean the H2O in the quasar is liquid, even though the temperature is -63F?
It’s getting rarer all the time with all of that Anthropogenic Galactic Warming (AGW) going on.
Arg. The quality of quibbles with this report has made me seriously downgrade my estimate of the “average” education and intelligence of WUWT readers.
Just to take the two main “questions”:
1) The time of occurrence is “real” enough, since all info and effects of the events are as current as they get. Until time-travel and/or instant wormhole travel are developed.
2) Water is vapour at various temperatures, depending on pressure. This water is at very low pressure over large volumes. The ice mentioned was congealed in local higher pressure environments.
Oh, and about the H2O condensing into stars? The hydrogen and oxygen dissociate long before stellar densities are reached. Stars contain no compounds, just elemental matter. That said, such stars would be very dense because of the high oxygen component.
The good news: In 12 billion years we will know what is out there today. The bad news: In 12 billion years we will know what is out there today. So when you jump into your “wormhole” to travel out there, you will likely find that there is nothing there – making all of your conjecture absolutely meaningless.
There is science and then there is philosophy. One without the other is either: just a bunch of observations that have no meaning or just a bunch of imaginings without any empirical basis. The intelligence and education of those who voice philosophical questions is doubtless superior to those who simply regurgitate theory or data without an understanding or curiosity of what it means.
We could use some of that water in drought stricken Texas
@jlb says:
July 23, 2011 at 5:38 pm
“An ESA article about ‘cold clouds and water in space’ can be found here: http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/142/cold-clouds-and-water-in-space “
Thanks for the link. I found that to be a good place to start.
@D. Patterson says:
July 24, 2011 at 12:42 am
“…Anthropogenic Galactic Warming.”
Thanks for the giggle. (Sadly, I think there are some who would believe you.)
Unless I see a planet-sized rubber ducky, I’m not buying it…
http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/universe.html
Let’s get started on the pipeline!
Wot’s that froot loop Goracle got to say about this?
And last time I checked, water simply wasn’t compressable either, so will this be the 2nd black hole to fill to overflowing while it disappeared simultaneously?; the goracle; being full of it, holding that singular honour of being being the first to do so of course.
Physics and entropy won’t be denied I hope you realise.
It is being written in real time because it is happening in real time. If the information got here, and thus existed here, in all four currently measurable dimensions, then that would mean that the future is predetermined, but due to the presence of level-one parallel universes, which cannot exactly replicate one another, the future cannot be predetermined, as there has to be an opertunity for a universal split into seprate, near replica parallel universes in which every possible outcome of the splitting point is played out, and the future is changed for each universe. If this were not true, then the world as we know it would be drastically changed by time travel into the past by those of our future.