Slashdot Mirror
Astronomers Find Largest Known Extraterrestrial Water Reserve
gerddie writes "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.
One team, lead by Matt Bradford, 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 Lisused, used the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps to find water. In 2010, this 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."
12 billion light years away means 12 billion years ago. That water will be scattered asunder by now.
we need to make a canal to bring it to earth
"surrounds a huge, feeding black hole"
In this particular case, I think it's a drinking black hole.
PA-DUM-PUM!
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
"Quasar Springs, all natural reverse-spring water. Our time reversal process uses the natural opposite of springs to bring crisp taste to your table, fresh from not being inside a black hole yet, and at under 99 quadrillion bitcoins per serving."
Discoveries which are economically exploitable (like the discovery of North America) tend to generate more interest. Also and also to be ruined. We'd find some way to spill something into the ocean nebula.
Gently reply
So basically, there's a freakin' huge ocean floating around (well, falling into a black hole) out in the middle of space? I submit that space is awesome.
Yes.
I think we should focus on sources closer to home, though.
That's easy. The third planet from Sol has huge oceans of the stuff, and rivers of it that don't contain much salt at all.
Someone's found the universe's plug-hole. The only question is: does the water go down it clockwise or anticlockwise?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The black hole will still be there.
& can teach us a thing or two about how to co-exist with others like ourselves, in peaceful cooperation, instead of wars & such
Why would a creature nothing at all like us have the faintest idea, let alone interest in, how to teach us about ourselves? It's like me trying to teach my dog to be a dog. It doesn't work. I can train her. I can correct her. I can reward her. But she will always be what she was born to be, and she will always have the urge to strain at the leash to play with other dogs she sees on the street.
It seems to me that you're looking for the magical beard in the sky here - the wise old man that will make everything better for you. If I may be so bold, why don't you grow up, stop worrying about everyone else, and make your own life better. Stop being an asshole, treat people with respect, and think about what you do. If everyone did this instead of just being selfish and not giving a shit, then the world would be a better place. However it's not, and I don't give a shit, and when you die can I have your stuff?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
We eat food because we're animals. We seek knowledge because we're humans.
"Now" = the time it would be 12 billion light-years from here if we could relocate objects without pushing them around through the intervening space. There are other frameworks conceivable for looking at the universe besides spacetime. :)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Because the more we know about everything, the easier it is to make things that do benefit us. It's impossible to say how this benefits us now but knowing more about how our universe works is always useful. Trying to put a dollar value on knowledge means we'll move more slowly than if we just try and understand it all and let genuises take the bits they need to make things better for all of us.
I would +1 you if I could you beautiful bastard. That is exactly the point.
I think these astronomers have been playing Darius a bit too much.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
Well, it won't be water by that point, just a bunch of smushed-together quarks of various flavors.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
"The water, equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world's ocean, surrounds a huge, feeding black hole"
Sounds like the business model of the movie "Waterworld," if you ask me...
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
There is only one ocean on Earth. The existence of several large landmasses isolating parts of that ocean from each other make it convenient to refer to the various part of the ocean by different names (Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, etc), but it's all one intermingling body of water.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I understand all of this and it's pretty clear to me (hence the "don't get me wrong" part). As I replied before, it's fine if people don't really know the non-obvious details about the implications of this kind of research (I don't). It's sufficient to say that. The Slashdot crowd always include lots of people pretty knowledgeable about astronomy and that's the point of my question. Even if these scientists are not looking to solve near-term problems, has their research benefited the average Joe in any way? I have a feeling it did, I just don't know how and would like to draw from the wider audience here. (ps. Can't wait for someone to call me a Luddite already).
none
Unfortunately a rather stupid sentient race located in Solspace rendered a good chunk of their rivers too polluted to use.
If your life were "FINE" you wouldn't be spending it posting this kind of incoherent, rambling drivel on Slashdot.
It tells us something about how the first stars evolved. That puts constraints on the physical models we use for stellar evolution and also of... well, physics. We can't create universes (yet), so the only way to know what happened during the Big Bang is to study what happened shortly thereafter, and to make sure that our theories of physics make predictions that are in accordance with our observations of the early universe. We now have some new observations of the early universe, which we can use to refine our theories.
The universe is 13.7 Gy old. The quazar is 12 Gly away. In 1.7 Gy, we now know that enough of the earliest stars had formed out of the universe's primordial hydrogen/helium, gone through their lives, and blown themselves up as supernovae (I've forgotten my freshman astronomy - can any astronomers confirm/deny that a star not massive enough to become a supernova, but massive to burn carbon into oxygen, can puff off their shells and create planetary nebulae, within a 1.5Gy lifespan?) or (with the preceding caveat in mind) release their oxygen into the mix.
We also know roughly how warm it is around that quasar, which tells us something about the rate at which matter is falling into its accretion disk. That tells us more things about the state of the early universe, and how black holes work, etc.
Newton and his silly prisms and figuring out how total internal reflection worked. Some dipshit at Dow Corning dripping molten glass through a funnel and wondering what to do with the really tiny strands of glass stuck to the top of the funnel when the glass ran out. You might be able to use the bendy glass structure and total internal reflection to create one of silly disco-era things, but that's about all it's good for.
Copper wire the only practical communications medium, and tungsten wire is the only practical light source. Lasers? PFFT, just a bunch of silly academicians playing with solid state physics. Way to expensive to stick one into a silly disco-ball lamp, and who'd want a bunch of random dots over every wall in your bedroom?
I'm sorry if you don't want to know what's over the next hill. Some of us think the universe is pretty neat. Others of us think that building cool gadgets is fun, and that the more we know about how the universe works today, the cooler gadgets our descendants will be able to build tomorrow.
His answer was meaningful; you just don't understand it. It's "curiosity": wanting to know things regardless of whether they'll be immediately useful. It's a sign of intelligence, and you probably exhibit it in other areas (though perhaps not, some people just lack curiosity altogether). You don't seem particularly "interested in knowing" what the use of this is (as you assert); you're pretty sure you already know the answer, and you're challenging someone else to "admit" that it doesn't qualify as something you consider worth knowing about. You're perfectly welcome to not be curious about astronomy, or particle physics, or 16th century French literature, or pre-Colombian cultures of North America, or birdsongs of the Mesozoic. But to say that there is no benefit to this knowledge to those who are thirsty with curiosity for it... seems to miss the point that other people have needs and wants and questions of their own, and they don't have to justify them to you.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
You guys are totally destroying my stoned mind right about now!
We seek knowledge so we can FIND OR MAKE MORE FOOD so we can MAKE MORE PEOPLE. I want them to find the CHON floating around in the OORT cloud.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
There is no there there. If it was 12 billion lightyears away 12 billion years ago, light from here leaving now will never fall there. It's outside of our light cone. The space between here and there is expanding at a rate faster than the speed of light. This quasar no longer exists as anything but a now-mythical story told in photons.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I have always hoped we would eventually discover proof of life elsewhere in the universe. Maybe this means it is a bit more likely?
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Does that mean there was water there 12 billion light-years ago, the light from which we are viewing now, therefore it might still be there but we can't tell for sure?
And does anyone else here share the stupendous wonder at life evolving with such a profound desire to know itself and its environment's outer reaches? So profound, in fact, that even in the midst of our darkest hours we still look to the stars for knowledge and the discovery of unimaginable beauty.
We are stardust evolving into self knowledge as we marvel at our own nature. There's little else that is quite as miraculous.
"Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff."
- Deep Thought
Someone should go nail this article to the foreheads of everyone involved in creating the movie Battle Los Angeles (in which aliens invade earth in order to steal all of our precious, precious water).
You're wrong and there is no need to lecture me. I'm curious and that's why I asked if anyone knew the practical implications of this kind of research. Feel free to engage in your pseudo-intellectual rant somewhere else.
none
galactic enema?
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Thanks for the first decent answer to this. I never said I don't want to know what's over the next hill. I do think the universe is pretty neat and that we should try to understand things better. I just asked if any of that kind of research created any other practical benefits. Much like the F1 racing teams research all kind of extreme engineering things to put a few cars in running in circles for no particular reason than entertainment... their research obviously translates into things we use daily. That's just it.. that's what I was trying to ask but there are too many pseudo-geniuses around here.
none
I can't say I'm any sort of metric master, but I'm quite certain 33ft is 11m.
I said I understood that it was not supposed to be practical research or immediately useful. Please read it again. "people like you"... thanks for assuming a lot.
none
It all goes down the drain..
For a 'normal' answer, maybe try:
We can better see the proportion of water in the universe, and therefore indirectly deduce other stuff, perhaps say, a more accurate origin of the universe (which in turn will help us unify physics and where the universe is heading, which in turn will give us better technology for other things, which in turn will make us use said technology to stimulate our 5 senses, which in turn will make us happier, and that's where we reach the end of the line, as happiness *really is* the ultimate goal).
Also, thanks to this, perhaps we will now know where to look, or how to look more easily for water somewhat closer to us (where in the future, we may have a chance of reaching).
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
If we irrigate all of Earth's deserts, the whole Earth is going to heat up. When the sand stops reflecting the Sun's rays back out into space, and the plants absorb the heat instead, it's going to get pretty hot. Add a bunch of water into the mix and it might get a bit more humid too... Not to mention that sea level might be a bit higher, cramping everyone closer together.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to live on that Earth. I'd rather we not bring that alien water to our planet; instead, use our own resources more effectively.
Then again, the added water could result in more clouds to reflect the Sun's rays, or the extra heat could kill off plants and return areas to desert... I never paid enough attention when reading about passive planetary temperature regulation systems.
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 a feeding black hole is called a quasar... thanks for the *great* summary!
John Collins, is that you!?
FTFY
12 billion light-years away
Then it means there was water there 12 billion years ago. Is there any left?
Inconceivable != what you think it means
FTFY
12 billion light years away means 12 billion years ago. That water will be scattered asunder by now.
I wonder if a cosmologist could check the validity of that statement because it seems to neglect universe expansion. Looking online at APM 08279+5255, its redshift is 3.911. Plugging that into wolframalpha indicates the the lookback time is 12bn years, but that the "actual" distance at this time is nearly 23.7bn lightyears. Redshift: http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/bibobj?2008A%26A...479..703G&APM+08279%2B5255 Wolfram: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=redshift+z%3D3.911&a=FSelect_**LookbackTimeFromRedshift--
Looks like the stupid race (who has somehow managed to survive and even understand the universe) will have to make do on Earth.
None but a fool would put all their eggs in one basket.... and do you really want Mr. T after you?
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
I'm not an egg. If the whole basket breaks, who will be around to miss them? Nobody! Which makes the 'eggs-in-basket' analogy rather inaccurate.
Flash, from the department for redundancy department, it's a Feeding Black Hole :)
Aaaaaand you would be quite wrong.
1mtr = 3.281ft
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)
Ceres has a great deal of water on it, some say possibly more
fresh water than the earth has.
"200 million cubic kilometres of water, which is more than the amount of fresh water on the Earth."
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
"Hopefully though, they're NOTHING LIKE US (or rather, the bogus side of us that is), & can teach us a thing or two about how to co-exist with others like ourselves, in peaceful cooperation, instead of wars & such! I think the "real answers" for us, as humanity, won't come from us here, or they would have by now!"
Considering much of industrialized US-centered humanity has been busy wiping out extra-terrestrial ocean-based alien intelligences like octopods and whales, and terrestrial ones like trumpeting elephants, and Islamic-banking-interest-free Muslims, I have to wonder if we in the USA could learn any lesson from any "alien"?
One answer is to laugh. :-) See my essay on intrinsic/mutual security: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
Villages full of laughing children is a fundamanetal truth of humanity that we ignore at our own peril... It's too bad we use compulsory schooling and/or napalm to destroy them so often.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Since you're posting AC you're probably not interested in releaving you're ignorance by actually reading a reply let alone the citation, but here goes anyway.The GP is speculating about the climatic effects from changes in albedo that a large infux of water would produce.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
what's the benefit for us here on Earth?
Without such knowledge, we would still think the sun goes around the earth, there are only 5 planets which also orbit the earth, the moon is a god, the sun is a god, and there are no real stars just tiny white dots painted on the teeny shell wrapped around our solar system, which is also the entire universe, and which is only 6000 years old.
Such knowledge moved us from the center of a very tiny universe, out to a fairly unimportant rock orbiting a fairly standard star, about half way out from the center of a galaxy, which is just one of many such galaxies, all doing the gravity dance inside a universe of which is so large and old that we can not even see it all.
Some humans do not think 'knowing things' is much of a benefit, however it is by 'knowing things' that all of our technology comes from. Without that technology, you would be unable to post a message on a vast computer network spanning our planet, with a post asking why making said post is important.
The black hole is one of those monstrous supermassive black holes at the center of active galaxies. The only known way such a black hole would disappear would be by means of Hawking radiation, however, since the black hole is so big and hence so cold (about 6.46e-17 K), it would today actually be absorbing more radiation from the cosmic microwave background (at 2.7 K) than it would be emitting from Hawking radiation, meaning that it would actually be getting bigger (slowly though) even if it were in empty space with no matter nearby getting sucked into its gravity well, as it would be absorbing the energy from the photons of the microwave background. Such a black hole would only begin evaporating once the background temperature had dropped to below its temperature (assuming the universe's eventual heat death), and as such will probably be around for about 1e100 years or more. Considering that the universe has only been around for about 1.3e10 years, that is a LONG way to go! The black hole's still somewhere out there, certainly. Can't say the same about the water though.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
I wonder how large the black hole's HOSTS file is...
For optimal comment enjoyment, take red pill now.
Doesn't "reservoir" imply it's reachable, usable as a water reserve? This water was rotating a black hole 12 billion years ago, and was probably all sucked up by the hole or the water molecules ripped apart in the quasar jets by 11.999 billion years ago. I don't think "reservoir" is quite a right word here.
Fortunately Ceres has abundant water, and a much gentler gravity well than the Moon. We're probably better off settling there first - though the commute will be a pain. Ceres is also conveniently close to the iron-rich asteroids we'll be building things out of.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I think it was Sagan who said "We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself". Shows you can have awe and profound thought without a Big-Sky-Daddy in sight.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I think it's just to distinguish between a black hole that has an apparent accretion disk and one that doesn't. Obviously a supermassive black hole, something that has an event horizon with a diameter similar to that of the Solar system, is always going to be hoovering up something. But a galaxy with an active black hole is different to the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way for example which is largely quiet at present (Sagittarius A*).
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The light left it long ago, when it was much closer.
Let us say it started out a foot away from me. Since it "started" in the big bang which is what started to expansion, from the first moment it is supposedly moving away from me at 2x the speed of light.
Now how, even one foot away, will that light reach me if the light it pushes "out" is also receding from me at the speed of light?
Perhaps this is some aspects of the physics of light I do not understand, but I don't see how something can reach when when moving away at any velocity.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Convenient for rather large values of convenient. Though I do agree, I wanna take my asteroid mining ship out and make my fortune.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I doubt we could answer that one way or another (as we can't resolve the object well enough at those distances) but first, we need to determine which direction is up, and which is down. We have people even on Earth who don't agree on that one.
http://flourish.org/upsidedownmap/
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
You're infux are broked.
"If I have been able to see so far, It is because I went out and bought a damn binoculars" - Ze da Esquina
You Piigs!
hahahahahhaha i kill myself.
"If I have been able to see so far, It is because I went out and bought a damn binoculars" - Ze da Esquina
140 trillion times all the water in the world's ocean + huge "tidal" forces from a huge, feeding black hole = KOWABUNGA DUDE!
Somehow there is a Disney movie in here somewhere.
"Space Surfers of APM 8279+5255"... OK its only a working title...