Title : Huge Reservoir of Water Discovered in Space 30 Billion Trillion Miles Away
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Huge Reservoir of Water Discovered in Space 30 Billion Trillion Miles Away
Water really is everywhere. Two teams of astronomers, each led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. Looking from a distance of 30 billion trillion miles away in a quasar, one of the brightest and most violent in the objects cosmos-the researchers found a mass of water vapor that is at least 140 trillion times greater than that of all the water in the world's oceans combined, and 100,000 times more massive than the sun.Because the quasar is so far away, its light has taken 12 billion years to reach Earth . Therefore, the observations reveal a time when the universe was only 1.6 billion years. "The environment around this quasar is unique in that it is producing this huge mass of water," says Matt Bradford, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA (JPL), and a visiting associate at Caltech. "It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even in the earliest times." Bradford leads one of two international teams of astronomers have described their findings quasar in separate documents that have been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters .
A quasar is powered by a massive black hole that is steadily consuming an encircling disk of gas and dust; as it eats, the quasar throws huge amounts of energy. The two groups of astronomers studied a particular quasar called APM 08279 + 5255, which contains a black hole 20 billion times more massive than the sun and produces as much energy as a thousand trillion suns.
Since astronomers expected water vapor to be present even in the early universe, the discovery of water itself is not a surprise, says Bradford. There are water vapor in the Milky Way, although the total amount is 4,000 times less massive than in the quasar, as most of the water of the Milky Way is frozen into ice.
However, 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 away (one light year is about six trillion miles), and its presence indicates that the gas is too hot and dense for astronomical standards. Although the gas is -53 degrees Celsius cold (-63 degrees Fahrenheit) and is 300 trillion times less dense than Earth's atmosphere, it is still five times hotter and 10 to 100 times denser than it is typical in galaxies like the Milky Way.
Water vapor is one of many types of gases surrounding the quasar, and its presence indicates that the quasar is bathing the gas in both X-rays and infrared radiation. The interaction between steam and water radiation and gas properties reveals how the quasar influences it. For example, analysis of water vapor shows how the radiation heats the remaining gas. In addition, measurements of water vapor and other molecules such as carbon monoxide, suggest that there is enough gas to feed the black hole to grow to about six times their size. If this will happen is not clear, astronomers say, since some of the gas may end up condensing into stars or may be ejected from the quasar.
team Bradford made his remarks from 2008, using an instrument called Z-Spec in the Observatory of Caltech Submillimeter (OSC), a telescope of 10 meters near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Z-Spec is an extremely sensitive spectrograph, requiring temperatures cooled to within 0.06 degrees Celsius above absolute zero. The instrument measures light in a region of the electromagnetic spectrum called the millimeter band, which lies between the wavelengths of infrared and microwave. water discovery researchers was only possible because the spectral coverage Z-Spec is 10 times that of previous spectrometers operating at these wavelengths. The astronomers made follow-up observations with the matched Millimeter-Wave Research in Astronomy (CARMA), a set of radio antennas in Inyo Mountains of Southern California .
This discovery highlights the benefits of observing in the millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, astronomers say. The field has developed rapidly in the last two or three decades, and realize the full potential of this line of research, astronomers, including CCAT authors are studies now designing a 25-meter telescope to be built in the desert Atacama in Chile. CCAT will allow astronomers to discover some of the first galaxies in the universe. By measuring the presence of water and other important trace gases, astronomers can study the composition of these primordial galaxies.
The second group, led by Dariusz Lis, senior research associate in physics at Caltech and deputy director of the CSO, used the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps to find water. In 2010, the team Lis was looking for traces of hydrogen fluoride in the spectrum of APM 08279 + 5255, but by chance it detects a signal in the quasar spectra indicating the presence of water. The signal was at a frequency corresponding to transitions radiation when water is emitted from a higher energy state to a lower one. While Lis's team found only one signal at a single frequency, amplitude broadband Z-Spec enabled Bradford and his colleagues to discover water emission at many frequencies. These multiple transitions water allows equipment to determine Bradford physical characteristics of gas and mass quasar water.
Source: universetoday.com
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