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Water Detected At Record Distance From Earth
Matt_dk writes with news that scientists have detected water in a galaxy 11.5 billion light-years from Earth. Evidence came in the form of emissions from water masers around a quasar at the center of the galaxy. Detection at such a large distance was made possible by a closer, intervening galaxy which acted as a gravitational lens.
"'We were only able to discover this distant water with the help of the gravitational lens,' said Violette Impellizzeri, an astronomer with the Max-Planck Institute for Radioastronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany. 'This cosmic telescope reduced the amount of time needed to detect the water by a factor of about 1,000,' she added. The astronomers first detected the water signal with the Effelsberg telescope. They then turned to the VLA's sharper imaging capability to confirm that it was indeed coming from the distant galaxy. The gravitational lens produces not one, but four images of MG J0414+0534 as seen from Earth. Using the VLA, the scientists found the specific frequency attributable to the water masers in the two brightest of the four lensed images. The other two lensed images, they said, are too faint for detecting the water signal. The radio frequency emitted by the water molecules was Doppler shifted by the expansion of the Universe from 22.2 GHz to 6.1 GHz."
If you don't give me *one million* dollars, I'll use my *maser* on all of mankind. (evil laugh)
Wake me up when they detect booz.
Filthy, barbaric Muslims are killing good, honest Christians right here on this planet, and all you can think about is water being found billions of miles away? Get some priorities!
"Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink."
but my refrigerator is closer if I want a drink.
We try to think about life as it may exist outside of our planet and solar system, but we always run into the problem of defining the term life. Because of our limited understanding, we search for pockets of water, which ought to at least provide a certain frame of reference close to our own in which we could find something that resembles life as we know it.
But we may also be overlooking life that we just don't understand and haven't the means to detect yet. Life as a system of planets, taking millenia to process a single thought. Life as rapidly integrating and disintegrating iron meshes on the surface of stars, communicating electrically and going through thousands of generations in seconds.
Finding water at these distances isn't so much the search for alternate worlds to habitate when we lose our Earth, it is much more a search for life similar to ours. But perhaps, I wonder, we are missing a whole range of other life in the universe due to our lack of capacity to imagine other types of life.
If the galaxy was 11.5 billion light years from earth, water existed there 11.5 billion years ago. The galaxy may not even exist now.
You might wonder why TFA calls a 100m-radio telescope 'giant'. That's because the radio telescope Effelsberg is fully steerable and was/nearly is the largest such telescope.
It's also a pretty cool sight when you drive through this quaint hilly region and suddenly come across this friggin' huge satellite dish. (Pic in German version of article gives better overview.)
If you were paying any attention at all in high school chemistry, you know that hydrogen and oxygen like each other quite a lot. Next we'll be getting all excited because we found table salt at interstellar distances.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Okay, this is what I've never understood. We're sitting here on Earth and we see through our telescopes an electromagnetic wave at frequency X. If you're told, "Actually the galaxy that emitted that wave is moving away from us at Y km/s." Then I get how you can use that to figure out the original "real" frequency of that wave... But if the only information you have here on Earth is X, how can you use that to figure out both how fast the source is moving away from us and what the original frequency was?
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
Smile, maser loves u!
(That's actually the work of a Dublin graffiti artist, quite a clever one. "maser" stuff is all over Dublin. You need to look through his website and Flickr stream.)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
World's largest supersoaker?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hydrogen is the most abundant element, and Oxygen isn't far behind, relatively speaking. The two combine easily to form H2O. So it shouldn't be so surprising that we find water everywhere we look, assuming that the physics that works here is the same everywhere else in the universe (and we'd have to throw out most of astrophysics if that weren't true).
Not a typewriter
are the important world's Gay Nigger time I'm done here, development models project somewhere feelow travellers?
Or scientist who lose the budget if they don't use it.
I work in this field, so I can answer.
The first item is how to know what frequency the material emits. We have a laboratory that contains radioastronomy equipment of the same type that is used to detect the signals from space, but it operates on samples in a vacuum chamber in the lab. So the Doppler shift on these samples is zero. We then take a spectrum of the material, noting the main spectral line frequencies.
The frequency shift to be expected (a function of the object's distance from Earth) is usually known at this point by other observations performed in the visible or infrared. Its a lot easier to measure the visible spectrum than the radio spectrum.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Maybe the people in Africa should solve their own water problems. You know, like the rest of the world.
I mean, look at how much good all of the world's handouts have done in Africa so far.
So the water was there 11.5 billion years ago, right? I wonder if any of it, like, evaporated and stuff?
Water, water everywhere, but how about finding oil over yonder?
Attention, parent poster and everyone who thinks like him: please immediately stop living without any of the technological advances which have been made possible by basic science which had no immediate an obvious practical advantage when it was first being done. This means, pretty much, going back to a mid-19th-c. standard of living, and certainly means that you need to get the hell off the net. Let us know how it works out for you, perhaps by carrier pigeon.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
How about just leaving them alone for once? You know, Africa might not have been the richest area of this planet, but it surely got worse the moment "we" started messing with them. In all our good intentions. First to "bring the light of Our Lord to them", then to "civilize" them, then to "help them develop", and with every incarnation it got worse. For $deity's love, leave those people alone! Every time you pour money or other "development aid" into the continent, some dictator gets richer and the people there suffer more.
Btw, I'm not alone with that sentiment. Unfortunately the story is too old to be covered by the papers anymore that carried it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And if they find some phosphoric acid in there, too, we'll get to hear that there be aliens because they already have Cola.
Water may be a necessity for life (at least the kind we know about), but it is no sign whatsoever that there is any. And at that distance, it doesn't matter for us either because we can't even get people to the next planet in our solar system, much less to the next solar system in our galaxy, so looking at water in some far away galaxy is pretty pointless.
Let's try to focus here, people. Let's get to Mars. Get something going there. And work from there. There's little use in looking for far away water when we can't even use the one that's just around the corner, universally speaking.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We've detected hydrogen and oxygen in a distant galaxy, and they actually combined when given the chance. Surely such a rare event was never suspected before and requires our confirmation. Now go have a beer.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
and has instead DistHended. All I ME! It's official Get tough. I hope how it was su4posed implementation to
Actually, Africa is one of the richest areas on the planet. Diamonds, coltan, oil and numerous other natural resources are taken from there by western companies under the eyes of well paid dictators.
mediocrity rules, man
I guess that joke was a little to subtle...
...Still no cure for cancer...
Our of knowledge and physics has a foundation in mathematics, mathematics concepts do not change just because you relocate to other parts of the Universe.
As for the second, I don't know what you are smoking, but seems to be very good.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
But I think sane people understand the word fiction pretty well...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Does an anonymous coward have to say it?
I, for one, welcome our Water Maser Wielding Overlords.
Filthy, barbaric Christians and Muslims are killing good, honest Humans right here on this planet, and all you can think about is water being found billions of miles away? Get some priorities!
Why have a bunch of good honest Christians and decent Muslims killing a bunch of barbarians on just the earth, when there is a whole universe to conquer? Now that we know that water is everywhere, its a good sign when we travel to the edge of the universe, we will be able to be baptised again as we refocus our zeal to continue the slaughter of the pagans anew!
This is my sig.