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."

Comments

The water will be gone

[Anonymous Coward]

12 billion light years away means 12 billion years ago. That water will be scattered asunder by now.

Re:The water will be gone

[Mandelbrot-5]

He may be correct, so long as he was using the correct place to measure time. "Now" is dependent on your frame of reference, if the frame of reference is earth then "now" there is a metric fuck-ton of water around that super massive black hole, if the frame of reference is there then there may be "now," a lot less. Who know's what "now" via an earth based frame of reference +12 billion years will hold.

Re:The water will be gone

[Sulphur]

12 billion light years away means 12 billion years ago. That water will be scattered asunder by now.

The water will be gathered by the black hole, which is still there. The black hole may contain the rest of the ingredients for Kool Aid.

Re:The water will be gone

[Xaositecte]

How can you prove something exists?

Lookin'.

Obligatory

Re:The water will be gone

[melikamp]

Actually, he almost understands epistemology: the word "exist" in his statement has no meaning. I like Wittgenstein's treatment of this usage: what would the opposing thesis be like? If someone told you "I don't exist", would you ask them for a proof or presume that you are being joked (philosophized) at? And if you had good reasons to believe that the person was dead serious, would you not doubt his sanity or at least his grasp of language?

that's a lot of water

[Anonymous Coward]

we need to make a canal to bring it to earth

Feeding?

[derGoldstein]

"surrounds a huge, feeding black hole"

In this particular case, I think it's a drinking black hole.
PA-DUM-PUM!

Re:Feeding?

[sribe]

...may have to be revised into "Drunk" black hole.

Nah, I bet that black hole can hold its liquor ;-)

Re:Feeding?

[tverbeek]

With added benefit of not having to pee.

Giant Space Ocean?

[ChinggisK]

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.

Re:Giant Space Ocean?

[mmcuh]

Or at least there was, a couple of billion years after the big bang.

Re:Giant Space Ocean?

[jfengel]

Not so much an "ocean"; the water is in the form of vapor, not liquid. It doesn't even look like a cloud, which is condensed water droplets. The density is most likely lower than the best vacuum we've ever pulled on earth. It's a lot of water, but a LOT of space.

Re:Giant Space Ocean?

[bledri]

It's not really "in the middle of space". Off to one side a bit, actually.

Actually, I think that every point in the universe could be considered the center (aka the middle of space.)

Re:Giant Space Ocean?

[avihappy]

It can't be moving away from us at more than twice the speed of light. Even if we were moving at just ander the speed of light in one direction and it is moving at just under the speed of light in the opposite direction, thats still just under twice the speed of light.

IANAPhysicist, but the object itself is not moving FTL with respect to the space around it, but the space itself is expanding. Here is some reading the corroborates this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light#Universal_expansion http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=575 "While special relativity constrains objects in the universe from moving faster than the speed of light with respect to each other, there is no such theoretical constraint when space itself is expanding. It is thus possible for two very distant objects to be moving away from each other at a speed greater than the speed of light (meaning that one cannot be observed from the other). The size of the observable universe could thus be smaller than the entire universe."

At last

[petes_PoV]

Someone's found the universe's plug-hole. The only question is: does the water go down it clockwise or anticlockwise?

Re:At last

[bourdux]

He he, it all depends if you're observing it from the front or from the back.

Re:So what?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

We eat food because we're animals. We seek knowledge because we're humans.

Re:Which one?

[tverbeek]

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.

Re:Bottled by Time Machine

[nomadic]

"under 99 quadrillion bitcoins per serving" Or, in US currency, $4.35.

Re:Don't know anything about astronomy

[symbolset]

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.

and if the waters gets sucked in??

[sl4shd0rk]

galactic enema?

Re:and if the waters gets sucked in??

[Urkki]

galactic enema?

Nah, more like pressure fusion steam cleaning. If it's crowded, the matter falling in to the black hole reaches billion of degrees, molecules breaking up, electrons ripped from atoms, nuclei fusing into new elements, before being ripped apart again by tidal forces (something like 10% of the matter is converted to energy per E=mc^2, when falling into a black hole in an accretion disk).

And if it's not crowded enough for it to get hot, then the lone water molecules will get ripped apart by tidal forces anyway, so it's not water that goes in.

Probably not as simple as that...

[avihappy]

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--

Re:Don't know anything about astronomy

[dido]

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.

Re:Feeding black hole? Are there any other types?

[Maritz]

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*).